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I'm a student in Manchester over here in the always sunny UK. I can juggle, like cats and can't say the alphabet backwards very fast.
The Podcastle is sexy, listen to it.
Games have become a backward-looking medium. Because game designers rely on the language of cinema, they have not sufficiently developed a new form of storytelling based on the language of video games. - Daniel Radosh 28/09/07
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Gamertag: wardrox
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Is the Roadrunner made of PS3s? Well, not really. This is a story I have seen cropping up across the web and it seems to me to be rather misleading. I would just like to clarify it for some people who may be confused. The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer is not made out of PS3s. The supercomputer is made out of a type of Cell microprocessor. The Cell microprocessor was designed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM in collaboration. The PS3 has an early version of the Cell in it, made at the 90nm feature size. Once Sony had the PS3's brain securely in place, they left Tohiba and IBM and stopped funding Cell research. The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer uses a more recent version of the Cell, a “high-performance double-precision floating-point version of the Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i, at the 65 nm feature size”. These are then put into IBM Blade servers to form the supercomputer. So there you have it. The supercomputer doesn't use PS3 technology, more accurately the PS3 uses older supercomputer technology.
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Living the dream since March 16, 2006
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The PowerXCell 8i have re-engineered SPEs, & in addition to the dual-precison Wardrox mentioned it also has improved memory addressability.
The PS3 cell actually has 6 SPUs, not 8. One is dedicated to the hypervisor (to make sure u evil pirates cant have burned movies or games, & make sure any game devs have to buy sony's SDK to run anything). The other is disabled for increased yield.
The Los Alamos project will also use one AMD Opteron CPU for every 2 Cells to manage them & execute general code. The PPUs arent really powerful enough to do it on their own.
Using PS3s probably would have been cheaper, but it's interface is too slow for what they need i think.
Oh, and a version of the PowerXCell 8i will likely end up in DVRs, BD players & TVs next. The PS3's cell will even make it's way into refrigerators & microwaves in the coming years. It's stream processing is good for monitoring conditions, actually one of the markets it was originally developed for.