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Playstation 3 and Mac OS X
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Although this sounds like it could happen, I dont see it. Not with this Gen anyways. Theres no need yet. Like said before, Maybe with PS4 but tiger on this, maybe if Apple had chosen Cell as their next gen Processors, yes but when they said intel, i saw this going down the drain
Wow. I was thinking about buying a mac, but if this is the group of people that I would be classified as being a part of if I did so, then screw that. You people have NO technical knowledge what-so-ever. I mean come on. How many times have I and countless other online review sites talked about how useless the Xenon and Cell would be as desktop processors. They would be dog slow primarily because of their in-order design.
But, I'm done here. You people be happy with your lack of knowledge and just keep hoping that Apple will put OS X on the cell, which would never happen even if you could get it to work because Apple would never do it.
lunarx3dfx said:
What websites? That haven't even touched the CELL processor nor programmed for it? The fact alone that IBM is going to release workstations based upon the CELL tells me that in fact this is a general purpose CPU...
And instead of criticizing everyone here please enlighten us with some knowledge please, some links, some general knowledge... I can give you a nice link right now: http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
There is a lot of technical info to be found explaining why the Cell would be a poor choice for general computing. I'm not going to bother looking, but Ars might be a good place to start. I'm not an expert anyways, and am not claiming what is or isn't possible.
It's not contradictory that the Cell might work for other applications (where lots of parallel threads are needed), and not regular desktop computing. It's a very specialized processor for specialized tasks.
In fact, you'll find plenty of discussion on how hard it will be to develop games on it. Developers are going to have to do a lot of work to efficiently use the PS3 (same goes for the XBox360). This further escalates the cost of game development, which was getting pretty expensive anyways.
As far as the ignorance of Mac users go, that seems like a poor basis to decide which computer to buy. Ignorance is universal-
It's not contradictory that the Cell might work for other applications (where lots of parallel threads are needed), and not regular desktop computing. It's a very specialized processor for specialized tasks.
In fact, you'll find plenty of discussion on how hard it will be to develop games on it. Developers are going to have to do a lot of work to efficiently use the PS3 (same goes for the XBox360). This further escalates the cost of game development, which was getting pretty expensive anyways.
As far as the ignorance of Mac users go, that seems like a poor basis to decide which computer to buy. Ignorance is universal-
This page is actually a summation of the XBox360 Xenon CPU, but provides a good overview of some of the issues that both Cell and Xenon developers face:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/7
I think it's easy to take raw performance numbers out of context, and apply them to desktop computers. It's like saying 'Why don't they port a jet engine onto a sports car?'
Developing for these new consoles is going to be hard. Which is sort of fine when the development budget for your application/game is $50 million, and you are hoping to sell half a million copies or so at $60 a pop.
But that's not the case for most Mac developers. And if there were realistic ways of making development on these CPU's much easier, then the middleware for the XBox360 and PS3 would have incorporated them. That's on top of the job of getting Mac OS (or any other OS) to run on these chips in the first place. On top of that, the non-graphics parts (which is 90% of most computer apps) are going to be even harder to run efficiently.
So while I'm sure its possible to port Mac OS onto PS3 or Cell (and perhaps even get it to run well), it's likely not the optimal way to better performance. Others having mentioned using the Cell as a GPU. This is fine, but consider that GPU's have similar architecture already. So it's not like the price/performance would be dramatically different.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-2.ars/7
I think it's easy to take raw performance numbers out of context, and apply them to desktop computers. It's like saying 'Why don't they port a jet engine onto a sports car?'
Developing for these new consoles is going to be hard. Which is sort of fine when the development budget for your application/game is $50 million, and you are hoping to sell half a million copies or so at $60 a pop.
But that's not the case for most Mac developers. And if there were realistic ways of making development on these CPU's much easier, then the middleware for the XBox360 and PS3 would have incorporated them. That's on top of the job of getting Mac OS (or any other OS) to run on these chips in the first place. On top of that, the non-graphics parts (which is 90% of most computer apps) are going to be even harder to run efficiently.
So while I'm sure its possible to port Mac OS onto PS3 or Cell (and perhaps even get it to run well), it's likely not the optimal way to better performance. Others having mentioned using the Cell as a GPU. This is fine, but consider that GPU's have similar architecture already. So it's not like the price/performance would be dramatically different.
blitzkrieg79 said:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050124-4551.html
I'm not saying I know which is right or wrong, but if I had to guess which provided a more realistic portrayal of the Cell (strengths and weaknesses) well...
madmaxmedia said:
I am not gonna defend blachford or attack ars, all I am saying is that the CELL architecture (Not the CELL processor found in PS3) has a lot of potential... CELL won't be limited to just one processor, CELL architecture will be developed to specific demands by customers...
The PS3 version of the Cell maybe doesn't have a powerful PPE unit but then again its a gaming console, Cell will be manufactured on a 65nm process anyway so theoretically lets say IBM would attach a Power5 lite as a PPE (yeah I know it doesn't exist but there have been a lot of rumors about it and maybe even it was being developed at one time) and that would be one multimedia powerhouse processor (the PS3 CELL was able to play 48 video streams simultaneously when Toshiba shown it off, try doing that on a dual dual core opteron, and we are talking here about one processor)...
The age when speed mattered for office apps has stopped when we hit 1 GHZ, now its the multimedia apps that need architectural adjustments, x86 is a overcluttered architecture... Anyway, I am not here to argue with anyone so all in all, some of you have your own opinions and I have my own opinion about PPC, Cell, x86 and such...
Guys, don't be silly. The PS3 will NOT RUN OS X.
While the Cell is the perfect multimedia processor (HD video decoding and video editting and photoshop) it's terrible for general purpose stuff (it doesn't even support out of order execution).
Apple would not come out with OS X on the PS3 for one simple reason: Intel. PS3 is coming out next year, around the same time Apple is switching to Intel. The PS3 will be around the next 5-10 years. Does Apple really want to keep supporting a PowerPC system that long?
On top of that, normal Mac apps cannot use the Cell's sub-processor, and those can only use the primary processor, which SUCKS terribly on its own. So you'd have to buy a special PS3-edition of Final Cut, a PS3 edition of Photoshop, etc.
Sony was saying it was capable of running Windows or Tiger. That doesn't mean its going to. Getting them to run on the Cell would either kill compatability with normal apps (Windows binaries don't run on PowerPC), or kill their performance (Mac apps wouldn't use the SPE's and therefore run terribly slow).
It WILL run Linux however. Screenshot:
Frankly, this is awesome. Sony has stated they're supporting homebrew; they want developers at home (using Linux) to create their own games and applications optimized specificly for the PS3. I can imagine that if they take some open source video editting software and optimize it for Cell they could even pull in the video edittors crowd as it would have astounding performance; I remember the demo of the PS3 playing 12 HD video streams at once. That was unbelievable because my computer barely handles one.
The possibilities are endless.
While the Cell is the perfect multimedia processor (HD video decoding and video editting and photoshop) it's terrible for general purpose stuff (it doesn't even support out of order execution).
Apple would not come out with OS X on the PS3 for one simple reason: Intel. PS3 is coming out next year, around the same time Apple is switching to Intel. The PS3 will be around the next 5-10 years. Does Apple really want to keep supporting a PowerPC system that long?
On top of that, normal Mac apps cannot use the Cell's sub-processor, and those can only use the primary processor, which SUCKS terribly on its own. So you'd have to buy a special PS3-edition of Final Cut, a PS3 edition of Photoshop, etc.
Sony was saying it was capable of running Windows or Tiger. That doesn't mean its going to. Getting them to run on the Cell would either kill compatability with normal apps (Windows binaries don't run on PowerPC), or kill their performance (Mac apps wouldn't use the SPE's and therefore run terribly slow).
It WILL run Linux however. Screenshot:
Frankly, this is awesome. Sony has stated they're supporting homebrew; they want developers at home (using Linux) to create their own games and applications optimized specificly for the PS3. I can imagine that if they take some open source video editting software and optimize it for Cell they could even pull in the video edittors crowd as it would have astounding performance; I remember the demo of the PS3 playing 12 HD video streams at once. That was unbelievable because my computer barely handles one.
The possibilities are endless.
lunarx3dfx said:
I just started reading through the comments in here with people quoting sites that think that a single PS3 would be on the top 500 supercomputers charts. Wow. Just...wow.
Actually...
They've gotten Linux to run on the XBox. Then they ran PearPC in Linux (a PowerPC emulator) and OS X within that. I'm sure the hard drive can be used to cache if you don't have enough RAM.
The result of course is that it runs like a sub-50 MHz Mac with 64 MB of RAM.
Not worth the effort other than to say that you did it.
..ahem...you can still emulate
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellstartsim/
..of course this IS December.
Maybe Steve will have a WWDC announcement? January? Oh well...
Also did a search on "Infiniband motherboards"..YES they have some now.
RapidIO motherboards...for you Moto holdouts? Snot jet..
WW
(ok..I forgot my Xmas wish list this year...ahem.."Dear Santa Steve..pls
tell your old grilfiend who works 'in the desert on classified projects'..to send
Avie one of them spacy POWER9 chips...you know the optical ones with the
built-in Network switches? If intel does drop the ball by 2010...then us ppc fanatics can do cell conversions on our old Amiga boxes right?")
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellstartsim/
..of course this IS December.
Maybe Steve will have a WWDC announcement? January? Oh well...
Also did a search on "Infiniband motherboards"..YES they have some now.
RapidIO motherboards...for you Moto holdouts? Snot jet..
WW
(ok..I forgot my Xmas wish list this year...ahem.."Dear Santa Steve..pls
tell your old grilfiend who works 'in the desert on classified projects'..to send
Avie one of them spacy POWER9 chips...you know the optical ones with the
built-in Network switches? If intel does drop the ball by 2010...then us ppc fanatics can do cell conversions on our old Amiga boxes right?")