[TriLUG] OT: PS2 Linux Cluster, NY Times story

[Jeff Jackowski]

On Mon, 26 May 2003, Scott Lundgren wrote:

>"By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux
>system on Microsoft's Xbox game console."
>
>;)

I bet they could if they wanted to given that there are several ways 
hackers do it, but I think MS would not be pleased.

Still, I don't think the researchers would want to. A good portion of the
Xbox's floating point performance is in the GPU and thus can only be used
for graphics. With the PS2, the same functionality is largely handled in
software on the Emotion Engine's Vector Units, which do not have to be
used for graphics. I'm told there are some games that use one Vector Unit
to do real-time DTS 4.0 or 5.1 encoding, but I don't have those games. Of
course, the Vector Units were made with the intention of doing graphics,
so they do have some notable limitations, like only being able to use
single precision floating point values.

But then, so what? It's a game console, and it's very good for games. That
it can be the basis for a supercomputer is a nice bonus. In the future,
though, game consoles may also be supercomputers. It sounds like that is
the direction Sony wants to move towards with their next console.

-- 
Jeff Jackowski
        http://ro.com/~jeffj/