That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
I think it’s a response to the sentiment that Sony somehow got bit by selling PS3 at a loss because it triggered some huge supercomputing purchases of the systems that Sony wouldn’t have liked, and that if Valve got too close to that then suddenly a lot of businesses would tank it by buying too much and never buying any games.
Sony loved the exposure and used it as marketing fodder that their game consoles were “supercomputer” class. Just like they talked up folding@home on them…
That’s a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn’t have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.
At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some “from the shelf” to make some server farm and such.
Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.
The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.
IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.
I’m not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we’ve seen, there aren’t going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.
That’s a tradition with gaming systems, see the Navy’s playstation supercomputer!
That’s the feel good warm marketing Sony spun for the thing. The PS3 sold around 88 million units. It flopped at first because it didn’t have any games for it. The Linux thing was a quirky fun but ultimately useless feature. You had to code custom software for the thing, it had no commercial software for Linux on a PS3. Its sales ballooned after it became the cheapest bluray on the market, and it was after the removal of otherOS support.
Less than 10 thousand were used for distributed computation clusters. The famous navy supercomputer only had 1.7 thousand units or so. Against the global sales numbers it was barely a rounding error.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what your point is - yes it was a broadly impractical thing to do, that’s not in dispute.
I think it’s a response to the sentiment that Sony somehow got bit by selling PS3 at a loss because it triggered some huge supercomputing purchases of the systems that Sony wouldn’t have liked, and that if Valve got too close to that then suddenly a lot of businesses would tank it by buying too much and never buying any games.
Sony loved the exposure and used it as marketing fodder that their game consoles were “supercomputer” class. Just like they talked up folding@home on them…
That’s a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn’t have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.
At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some “from the shelf” to make some server farm and such.
Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.
The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.
IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.
Retail units couldn’t access most of the RSX in OtherOS for Sony reasons, Geohot fixing that was why they killed OtherOS.
Apparently the DOD units never had any lockouts on the GPU.
I’m not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we’ve seen, there aren’t going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.