[geeks] PS/3's, Linux, etc, was: Second Life is not a game?

[nate at portents.com]

> I don't understand (yes I'm being exceptionally thick here), if it
> is just computational tasks, besides (not) being big endian what is the
> difference between a PC running 64 bit Linux and a PS/3?

There's a tremendous amount of difference between a PS3 and most other
processors.  Arstechnica had a couple of good articles on it.

Part I:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars

Part II:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars

In a nutshell, the Cell is a real pain to program for, however, if you
program it well, it has incredible potential performance and crazy bus
bandwidth.

A good case study of this is Folding at Home for the PS3, which is something
it dominates in.  If you read about it, you can see why, and understand
why the Cell/PS3 is a very good choice for certain types of problems:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070326-why-the-playstation-3-owns-the-pc-in-fh.html

You might also want to look at this for more info:

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

- Nate