Ender’s Game Gets a Playstation
It’s come to light that the otherwise troubled Playstation 3 has something of a serious patron in the US Air Force. Specifically, it appears that this branch of the US Armed Forces has ordered up 300 of the latest Sony consoles. To do what, you ask?
The Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting a technology assessment of certain cell processors. The processors in the Sony PlayStation 3 are the only brand on the market that utilizes the specific cell processor characteristics needed for this program at an acceptable cost.”
People much smarter than I, and far more dedicated to technology have spent numerous posts trying to figure out just what the Air Force is up to, with most of the comments focusing on just what the processors can do. The speculation, mixing science fiction with fact, is delightful.
PS3 Cell processors are utilized for research purposes in my neck of the woods as well. Not that strange whenyou get ten times the calculating power for your buck when buying a PS3 than a regular PC. IIRC one of our domestic universities worked on a project with IBM in making PS3s run as serial processing numbercrunchers for research purposes. Probably something akin to what the USAF is doing (though I love your Ender reference… makes me wonder whatever happened to the movie, of to IMDB)
March 11th, 2008 at 5:29 amReminds me of the time when PS2 was banned from NK due to possible threat of the commies using the cell processors in guided missile systems.
March 11th, 2008 at 5:53 amJust as with the Commodore Amiga haveing had been under the same restrictions, seeing that it was the motorola CPU in the Amiga that was also used in Patriot Missisles back in the GW I (Gulf War I) days.
And seemingly the Enders Game movie is still in pre-production as it has been for years. Gah, I have high hopes for this with OSC wtiting the script himself and Wolfgang Petersen as the director. Das Boot is a classicer and Enemy Mine has always been an underdog favourite film in my world.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:13 amYeah, I know, the story is screaming for movie, and with special effects what they are today, it could be so gripping. I’m thinking, for example, of how great the new BSG is. I’d be so curious to see how someone brings the visuals of this story to life. Plus, wouldn’t it be timely?
March 11th, 2008 at 11:14 amOpening the case will void the warranty!
http://www.us.playstation.com/Support/PS3/Warranties
On a side note, PS3 cell chips have grid computing functionality and great security because the “… Cell bakes security into the silicon with innovations such as a memory design that allocates memory into secure chunks.”
Sounds uber techy Coooool! I bet they’re going to use it for recruiting purposed.
Kelly
from TX
Quote from article at CNET
PlayStation 3 Cell chip aims high
March 12th, 2008 at 1:49 amThe Cell processor, to be introduced at a research conference next week, implements some radical changes from current chip design.
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: February 4, 2005, 11:20 AM PST
“Purposes” I goofed on spelling
March 12th, 2008 at 1:53 am@Marie
Indeed it is timely, both in our ability with filmmaking and as a zeitgeist comment.
@Kelly
As far as I understand, the difficult thing about progamming for CELL is that emmory handling has to be custom tailored to every program. “Where an ordinary PC-processor is sped up by the automatic use of L1- and L2-cache and prefetch-cues which take up over 90% of the surface of the processorchip, the PS3 Cell processor has nothing of the sort.
‘The Cell-processor is made of a Power PC-processor and eight lesser subprocessors, each with it’s own RAM-area, and it’s completely up to the programmer to manage the cues and avoid congestion’ says PhD student Martin Rehr, Copenhagen University” -Ingenøren Online, Tue Dec. 4th ‘07 http://ing.dk/artikel/83826 (own translation).
This is what makes it very difficult to use, seeing that you have to take into account the latency in the travelling distance for the data. The failure to do this can make data arrive at the wrong time and make everrything go FUBAR, this is what happened in many of the 1st generation of the X-Box 360 because of the twin factors of having a rushed assembly process and no electrical engineers highly placed on the development team, they were all computer scientists (I am sorry, but I will have to ask you to take my word for this, as I can’t seem to find an online reference I can link to).
March 12th, 2008 at 4:55 am