When US Air Force researchers last year created the mother-of-all-processors using Sony PlayStation-3 game consoles, it seemed like a stroke of cost-saving genius.To deliver a 53-TerraFLOP processing cluster, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., hoovered up 1,700 PlayStation-3 game consoles, then harnessed the power of their combined processors to evaluate new breakthroughs in technology for synthetic aperture radar, high definition video and something called "neuromorphic computing". At the time, the researchers noted that two PlayStation-3 consoles provide 150 GigaFLOPs of processing power for $600, but a single 3.2GHz cell processor delivers 200 GFLOPs for $8,000. Why spend the...