PS3 - "How to install another OS on your PS3"

[ReD_KiPPeR]

What would be the point in installing an OS on the PS3? Surely its purpose is a gaming console, so will have good graphics capabilities but a really slow CPU compared to modern PCs?

I remember seeing that the PSone only had a 90MHz processor!

[charleski]

But, but, it's a super-computer! It's all the computer you'll ever need!

Though seriously, it'll probably be reasonably fast even without using all the parallelism, certainly good enough to browse the web and play videos from the LAN.

[5lab]

What would be the point in installing an OS on the PS3? Surely its purpose is a gaming console, so will have good graphics capabilities but a really slow CPU compared to modern PCs?

I remember seeing that the PSone only had a 90MHz processor!

it will be fairly slow - the ps2 had a 300mhz cpu, which was equivilent of a bottom end pc of the time..

..but...

aside from games, what do you actually need a powerful cpu for? sure, video editing.. cad.. but thats not what the average home user does.. word processing, spreadsheets and the internet worked just fine on pcs 5 years ago, so the ps3 theoretically has far more than enough power..

[directhex]

What would be the point in installing an OS on the PS3? Surely its purpose is a gaming console, so will have good graphics capabilities but a really slow CPU compared to modern PCs?

I remember seeing that the PSone only had a 90MHz processor!

34MHz MIPS R3000. you're thinking of the 94MHz MIPS R4300 in the n64

and as 5lab says, what do you need a top-end PC to do?

installing an OS allows the easy bits like word processing, email, and web - and also opens the door to an active homebrew community

[magneticman]

a really slow CPU

what?

it's faster than all current mainstream processors isn't it?

seven cores and 2 teraflops of power and some have been clocked at 5ghz, with it being easily clocked past 4ghz.

Altogether the Cell processor is a crowded little chip, with a whopping 234 million transistors (compare to AMD64’s 114 million transistors). The potential processing power of Cell blows away existing processors, even supercomputers. One Cell working alone has the potential of reaching 256 GFLOPS (gigaflops, processing 256 billion floating point operations per second). GFLOPS are benchmarked with a program called Linpack and are mostly usefull for comparing supercomupters. To compare, your home PC would be extremely lucky to reach 6 GFLOPS, unless you count your graphics card.

could be old though, but im pretty sure cell>pc for the moment

[Dooms]

Giving a way to allow people to put stuff onto your system.. surley it will only be a matter of time before someone uses that to get pirated stuff working.

[directhex]

what?

it's faster than all current mainstream processors isn't it?

seven cores and 2 teraflops of power and some have been clocked at 5ghz, with it being easily clocked past 4ghz.



could be old though, but im pretty sure cell>pc for the moment

depends for doing what.

vector processing isn't suited to general desktop work. which is why "arch 1 > arch 2" arguments are usually very silly - there's no catch-all answer to which is better, it's a per-app or even per-algorith question as to which architecture is best

(spoken as someone currently looking at buying itanium, opteron, or power5)

[magneticman]

oh right

good to know...

[TheAnimus]

you make it sound as if you can't already buy a cell-based system running linux - not to mention YDL5 which is a commercial distro specifically targetting the ps3

for the price of a PS3?

I don't mean to say that the PS3 is ground breaking per say, just that it puts a differen't technology in the hands of the average joe.

[directhex]

for the price of a PS3?

I don't mean to say that the PS3 is ground breaking per say, just that it puts a differen't technology in the hands of the average joe.

i fail to see how 'linux porters are sad virgins' could be interpreted as above

especially given cell has been part of the standard linux kernel tree since 2.6.13

[SilentDeath]

The future of consoles?

Someone said standardisation. Nope, its gone about as far as it will ever get. This is simply becuase the cost of games subsidises the stupidly low price of the consoles. If consoles were standardised, the console makers would lose this revenue, and the price of consoles would be more than a very decent pc.
At best the hardware might be standardised (when large HDTV's get connected to pc's - which will have to wait another few years for one pc to be enough for a whole household), and you will be buying just an OS from sony that can run in a virtual machine on the pc. Costs would go down, games would stay the same price, but MS would probably win if that happened.

However consoles (usually) are a step behind current tech when they are released, so there is really no big benifit from this. Xbox360 for example uses a dx9 based graphics card (so does the ps3? nvidia one?). Dx10 is about to be released, and has quite a lot of big improvements.

The cell processor would probably never have happened without IBM (who were looking for new customers to replace apple?) and if this can be seen as a echnical achevment, it will probably not be any more from consoles for a (long) while.

The main argument against pc's as a gaming platform (from consumers) is:

The almost-HDTV resultion monitor, which was available 20 years ago, it too small for your bad eyesight/you only want to play crappy split screen football games on a sofa, at a distance ddesigned to blur the artifacts from your SDTV.

2) controles, again see 1^, you only want to play crappy games with a joystick (and whine about people cheating in online FPS when they use a mouse)

3) They wernt designed for games in the first place. This is compleatly wrong. 99% of a modern pc was designed wth gaming in mind, just as your xbox360 and most other consoles use 99% pc parts in a slightly modified standard.

[kizbits2000]

Hi, I am new too thgis forum, But I have run one of my own with many aqrguements like this, and the one thing that annoyed me the most about these arguements was that people didn't do their research!, I mean I have only seen like... 2 people actually bother too look up how fast the CPU of a PS3 acctually is...
I looked it up and it runs at 3.2Ghz - 4.0Ghz so all you people calling it slow unless you have spent loads on your computer then it actually clocks at around about the same speed.

Thanks for reading
Kieron

[directhex]

Hi, I am new too thgis forum, But I have run one of my own with many aqrguements like this, and the one thing that annoyed me the most about these arguements was that people didn't do their research!, I mean I have only seen like... 2 people actually bother too look up how fast the CPU of a PS3 acctually is...
I looked it up and it runs at 3.2Ghz - 4.0Ghz so all you people calling it slow unless you have spent loads on your computer then it actually clocks at around about the same speed.

Thanks for reading
Kieron

there's no "-4ghz". it's a 3.2ghz part

and you can't compare clock-for-clock across architectures. run a double-precision floating point operation or two, and a 2ghz core2 will stamp on cell, even with spe optimization

[Dubzer]

Well I don't know if this is a totally ridiculous ask but would in your opinion be possible to use the default O/S on the PS3, X360 and some previous models to create an emulation software which will allow me to run the actual media on a PC (which would obviously match the requirements hardware wise)?

basically its a possible project I will be carring out for college, so is it worth any thought?

[Steve]

If I've understood the question correctly. Nope.

The OSes involved are compiled for their target CPUs (those within the consoles). To get them to run on a PC you'll have to get versions for the x86 (or recompile), at which point they won't be compatible with the binaries you want to run on them any more.

In essence, the OS won't help you write the emulator/simulator.

[Dubzer]

thanks for the help. now i gotta find another project.....