MikeB said: @ masschamber so the ps3 can outperform a 386 running at 15 Mhz, wow news to me current upper limit of 10--15 million cycles per second -- in Intel-based architecture Somehow I think Intel has better chips than 386s.

No, you tell us why you said 10-15 million cycles per second which means 10-15 MHz...

 

@ NJ5

No, one cycle here refer to whole cycle calculations I presume, not CPU clockrate which refers to a single basic operation.

Ah, I didn't realize you were quoting from the article, forget it. That's certainly a weird usage of the word "cycle".

@ NJ5

So Insomniac (released their second much improved game 1 year after Resistance) can do it, they are sharing their knowledge with 3rd party developers. It will get a lot easier for developers to tap into this potential.

BTW, in part 3 of the Insomniac gametrailers interview they call the SPEs to be the core of the system and following games will become even "a lot" better. They also talk a little about how they are sharing their knowledge with 3rd party developers:

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/4572.html

IMO Resistance was the most impressive launch game, beating any other PS3 or XBox 360 launch games. And Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune as the most impressive Next Gen games currently available.

Here we go again...

Entroper said: Here we go again...

 Just leave it man, just leave it...

@ Entroper

Is it really so hard to ignore Sony or SPE topics? How old are you?

BTW, in the Insomniac interview they also stated Resistance used less than 10% of the available SPEs.

The topic was about PS3s being used to crack passwords, not "MikeB's thread to pimp the Cell for gaming," otherwise I would certainly have ignored it. And it's not just me, several members have already expressed frustration with every thread that discusses the Cell turning into the same spam over and over.

@ Entroper

Which is achieved by the calculating power of the SPEs. On a gaming orientated website like this I don't think it's bad to address its relevance to gaming.

Another interesting article on the PS3/Cell:

"With the computing power of 25 desktops, the PlayStation 3 now doubles up as a scientific research tool

How would you use a PlayStation 3? Sounds like a silly question because everyone knows Sony’s PS3 is for gaming. But a physics professor in the US has other uses for it.

Gaurav Khanna of the University of Massachusetts is using the PS3 not to play Tekken 5, but to unravel complex problems in astrophysics — “simulations to understand what gravity waves would look like if a small star gets captured by a black hole,” Khanna told DNA.

Why the PS3? Khanna needed phenomenal computing power to conduct his simulations. One option was to connect desktop computers in parallel and use their combined processing power. “I would’ve needed 200 desktop PCs for the purpose. The cost and space issues along with power consumption made that totally impractical,” he says. The other option was to use a supercomputer. “Time constraint was the problem with a mainframe computer. You have to pay for specific time slots, and that didn’t suit me either.”

It was then that Khanna decided to try out the PS3, which has 25 times the computing power of a desktop PC thanks to its processor dubbed ‘a supercomputer on a chip’.

Developed jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, it has eight processing units capable of handling separate computing tasks simultaneously.

Khanna put together eight PS3s in a grid, and presto, he had something close to a supercomputer at his command, at a small fraction of its cost. “Its computational power makes it possible to do things that were difficult earlier,” Khanna says of the PS3.

Khanna ran the Linux operating system on the PS3. “Given the open PS3 platform and the legendary performance of the Cell processor that powers a PS3, it was natural to consider it for scientific research,” he says.

So while his daughter enjoys Tekken 5 on the console (Prof Khanna has one at home for gaming), he puts the same processor to task to understand the mysteries of the universe."

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1136660