Sony's Playstation 3: GPU and supercomputer rolled in one game console.
To: ShadowAce
2 posted on
12/13/2009 10:39:54 PM PST by
KoRn
(Department of Homeland Security, Certified - "Right Wing Extremist")
To: myknowledge
WHat the airforce did(very clever) was to rip off sony. IN A BIG WAY.
You see, sony loses money on every PS3 it sells. It’s what they call a loss leader. They make up for it by selling games to play on the PS3. When you have a PS3, you can only play sony games on it. So sony can rip you off on the games once they got you convinced to buy a PS3.
the airforce guys were very clever and figured out they were buying some fairly powerful computer chips for less than it cost to make them. So they bought a couple thousand of those PS3s and ripped them apart for the chips, and linked them together to create a cheap supercomputer. Sony just sold thousands of PS3s to the airforce with ZERO PROSPECT of selling any high priced games to them to make up for the loss on the PS3 sales.
To: myknowledge
What other militaries have bought this machine? Iran? Russia? China?
4 posted on
12/13/2009 10:41:29 PM PST by
Thunder90
(Fighting for truth and the American way... http://citizensfortruthandtheamericanway.blogspot.com/)
To: myknowledge
Just so everybody is aware, computers made from GPUs are not the same as general-purpose supercomputers, their awesome power can only be harnessed for embarassingly parallel operations. So for certain uses, it’s a great idea. For many other uses, traditional, expensive supercomputers (all of which are based on thousands of nodes made of off-the-rack CPUs) are best.
7 posted on
12/13/2009 10:56:57 PM PST by
LifeComesFirst
(http://rw-rebirth.blogspot.com/)
To: myknowledge
PS3 Slim doesn't do Linux any longer.
And of course there is an article from Hack A Day that says, PS3 Slim axes Linux support
If the PS3 Fat had remained available, I would have eventually purchased a NEW one specifically for running Linux. Oh well. It seems that several PS3 Clusters of Linux boxes were used for brute force breaking of cryptographic encoding. Must not allow that !
8 posted on
12/13/2009 11:36:32 PM PST by
pyx
(Rule#1.The LEFT lies.Rule#2.See Rule#1. IF THE LEFT CONTROLS THE LANGUAGE, IT CONTROLS THE ARGUMENT.)
To: myknowledge; rdb3; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; GodGunsandGuts; CyberCowboy777; Salo; Bobsat; JosephW; ...
15 posted on
12/14/2009 5:43:39 AM PST by
ShadowAce
(Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
To: myknowledge
The latest version of this system will give you a teraflop of computing power for $10,000. A Teraflop? OMG... Then again, now that this has been published, the Iranians will got out and buy up all the PlayStations...
17 posted on
12/14/2009 5:52:13 AM PST by
GOPJ
(Journalists as BaghdadBobLite - Global Warming Scientists as ElmerGantry - what's happening?)
To: myknowledge
The latest version of this system will give you a teraflop of computing power for $10,000. A Teraflop? OMG... Then again, now that this has been published, the Iranians will go out and buy up all the PlayStations...
18 posted on
12/14/2009 5:53:46 AM PST by
GOPJ
(Journalists as BaghdadBobLite - Global Warming Scientists as ElmerGantry - what's happening?)
To: myknowledge; Tax-chick
(This author really likes parentheses).
To: myknowledge
Hmmm...and to think that I was proud of myself for hooking my PS3 up to my WiFi and getting instant Netflix downloads. Everything’s relative...
25 posted on
12/14/2009 8:19:01 AM PST by
Pharmboy
(The Stone Age did not end because they ran out of stones...)
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