There will be a PS3 laptop

[omgwtfbbq]

sc94597 said:

Loud_Hot_White_Box said:

sc94597 said:
THe ps3 sucks at using linux. This is because it's CPu uses inorder processing which is pretty primitive. The last pc cpu to use in-order processing was the original pentium. SO you should just cut it's clock speed in half. Then you have that small amount of memory compared to pcs which bottlenecks it. This is using the core without the spus btw. You are also talking about years down the line when the ps3 will be even more outclassed by pcs. the most I would pay for it would be $300.

$300?  For a portable PS3 with a screen to play on?  Ok...

Yeah, currently PS3 doesn't allow linux to access the SPUs at all, i think, which is part of the problem there.  The PS3 can get better at using Linux.  That improvement would be a (DUH) no-brainer before releasing a laptop.

IBM is building blades and supercomputers with Cell/PPC combined chip clusters.  The shit owns.  More will probably have to be done to get the PS3 version of Linux to take advantage, but not too big a deal.

$300...way, way low, and most people would compute things way differently I think. 

Um you are talking about years from now right? By that time the ps3 will probably be about less than $300 and the screen would probably be around $30 to make. The sell isn't as good as you think. Yes for number crunching its good, but operating systems run better on an out of order processor than an in order one. You should cut the ps3s clock speed in half to see how much performance it is capable of. There is very little ram in the ps3, and in the future I could see 2gb of ram being what the mainstream pc has. The pcs are already far more capable than the ps3 at running operating systems and it will just be more capable in the future. Also FishyJoe is talking about linux not being able to support alot of software. I say use wine , but the ps3 has so little ram it wouldn't be worth it.

 

I had a feeling this would come up. The acronym "Wine" stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". The truth is Wine is not actually an emaulator, it's a compatibility layer which intercepts native Windows calls and translates them into native Linux calls. What does this mean to the user? What pray tell, is the difference between an "emulator" and a "compatibility layer"?

The main difference is that with Wine, the software is running on the actual chip itself. It is not being run through an emulator, the actual machine code that the compiler generated is being run on the actual CPU of your machine. Then when the hardware requests a specific windows function (such as to draw a window on a screen) wine intercepts that call and passes it on to an equivelant Linux call. This allows for much quicker deverlopment than a full-blown emulator and also is what allows for Windows apps under Wine to run almost as fast as the equivelant Linux app.

Of course, the crux of the problem is that since Wine relies on the software running on the actual CPU, the CPU has to be able to handle the specific machine code the software is written in. In other words, a piece of software written for x86 will only work on x86 and will not run on anything else. To put it even more plainly, No Windows software can run on PS3 Linux and Wine, no matter how much RAM or whatever. It will simply not work. You will need a full blown Virtual Machine such as VMWare (and I'm not sure one exists that runs on Cell either). 

Of course, There are plenty of native Linux apps that are open source and theoretically should workon Cell, to do almost everything. You will either have to hunt for precompiled cell versions or compile it yourself (and hope that it will actually compile). But Fishy is pretty much right, there will be very little software you can run on your PS3 Linux.