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.
2000 or so machines would be but a drop in Sony’s bucket of sales for that model.
I wonder how they avoided DMCA issues. If it’s illegal to hack the system as is, isn’t it just as verboten to reverse engineer the central chip to serve as a standalone processor?
“So they bought a couple thousand of those PS3s and ripped them apart for the chips.”
Even more interesting if true. Are you sure they “ripped them apart”, or did they install Linux and link the unmodified boxes with something like Rocks, or another Linux cluster distribution. The technology has been around for quite awhile, and seems to be limited by the number of boxes a developer was willing to purchase and link together. Obviously, in the case of DOD, price is less of a constraint and they could get a bunch of computing power for the buck by doing this. Just curious if you are sure they were broken up. Could be, but it is quite possible they were simply clustered as intact PS3’s. It would be interesting to know this.
“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 ....”
Actually, a more likely scenario is that they worked out a deal with Sony to unlock the PS3 so that it becomes a more general purpose computer instead of a game machine.
Removing the chips in a PS3 is no easy task. It’s not like the old days where the chips were mounted on the PCB with thru-hole components or surface mount pins. The Cell has hundreds of little solder balls for “pins”. You can remove this kind of chip packaging from a board, but it is very labor intensive and not very reliable.
You also need detailed information on the processor to program the system. Assuming the system hasn’t been hacked, you really can’t do much with the PS3 in Linux mode since there is a lot of restriction as to the hardware you can use on the PS3.
So, for a few thou I could have a supercomputer in my basement or something.
“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.”
That isn’t a rip off by the USAF, that is stupidity by Sony.
How do you feel about the Japanese not paying anything close to the cost of our military to defend their country? I'm sure they would prefer to defend themselves but they lost that right several times over.