PS3 Open Platform - some big news

[Rangers]

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/748/748255p1.html

IGN does what I thought was a good basic lookover for the laymen, like me. They complain a bit about the RAM.
________
The Sanctuary of Truth

 

[SPM]

Those scores don't look single core to me -- seems like a Quad core based on the "multi-threaded" results. And that's just a mean comparison.

PPE alone vs a (conroe based? Quad core?) Xeon? Meow!

Hell, PPE alone vs any recent x86 chip is going to be a sad fight. Not really unexpected scores though.

It is definitely two dual core Xeons - see http://www.apple.com/macpro/

Quad Core. Up to 3GHz.

Every Mac Pro in the lineup features two of the newest Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. Two dual-cores. One powerful quad workstation. And you get to decide how fast it flies: 2GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3GHz. And at 3GHz, the Mac Pro runs up to 2x faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad.(1)

Anyway this site gives what seems to be a reliable cross processor comparison, which agrees with Apple's claims (with a bit customary down clocking of the quad G5 and a bit exaggeration) and all the other benchmarks we have seen.
http://www.systemshootouts.org/processors.html

PS3 PPE alone = P4 rating of 2.5 (ie. equal to a 2.5GHz P4) = 1.6GHz G5
Quad core Xeon 2.8GHz = Quad core G5 2.5GHz = P4 rating of 6.5 (about 2.6 times as fast as PS3 PPE alone)
Dual core Xeon 3.06GHz = P4 rating of 3.9 (approx 1.6 times as fast as the PS3 PPE alone)

On desktop applications, the quad and dual core Xeons and G5s will of course perform more poorly than applications that can be thredded to distribute workload evenly across cores.

Cell using all cores (PPE plus 7 SPEs) who knows!

 

[liolio]

"dumb questions".

How MS prevent hackers to port linux on the 360.

By a lot of means, it seems that the 360 could be a great linux box. (uma =512Mb of ram triplecore)
"/dumb question"

if a 3.2Ghz PPe = 2.5Ghz pIV that means a loss 22% in efficience/frenquence against a 3.2 pIV.

it looks fery fews in regard of cache size, worse branch prediction, and IoE vs state of the art OoE X86 cpu. Are you sure of this statement? (not that old pIV are know for a great ration ghz/perf...lol)

if this true the xenon can be a very good cheap processor. Can some extrapolate this bench to the xenon peformance?

Anyway all of these datas should be use as data for the amazing thread about the future of console cpu (OoE etc...)

 

[Panajev2001a]

The SPE's are in general significantly faster than the PPE for almost any workload that will fit in their limited local memory.

Which seems to beg the question, who out of these three characters lead the design of the PPE (given how Faf is choke full of love stories about amazing things the PPE can do "including stalling on cache hits") ?

.

 

[Teasy]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong (and this is not a console war thing at all) but isn't the PPE in 360's CPU less powerful then CELL's PPE? If CELL's PPE is around the speed of a 1.6Ghz G5 or 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 can we extrapolate what each of 360's PPE's would compare to?

 

[one]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong (and this is not a console war thing at all) but isn't the PPE in 360's CPU less powerful then CELL's PPE? If CELL's PPE is around the speed of a 1.6Ghz G5 or 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 can we extrapolate what each of 360's PPE's would compare to?

I guess the PPE and the PX (360 CPU core) are not much different in these general benchmarks as you can't access the increased VMX registers of the PX unless you use the extended instructions. I don't know how the removed 16-bit integer ALUs in the PX affect these benchmarks though.

 

[SPM]

I guess the PPE and the PX (360 CPU core) are not much different in these general benchmarks as you can't access the increased VMX registers of the PX unless you use the extended instructions. I don't know how the removed 16-bit integer ALUs in the PX affect these benchmarks though.

The cache per core is a bit less on the 360 CPU as well.

 

[PeterT]

If CELL's PPE is around the speed of a 1.6Ghz G5 or 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 can we extrapolate what each of 360's PPE's would compare to?

We could, but it would make only limited sense. Checking the performance of the PPE in this cross-platform general purpose benchmark makes sense, because it gives us an idea how well (or not) quick & dirty ports of Linux applications will run on PS3 after just a recompile. With XBox360 there is no large amount of legacy software that will be ported this way, so a comparison based on this doesn't tell us a lot. Performance on native apps developed specifically for the platform - in other words games - will be very different, especially given the non-OOE nature of the CPUs.
(In the same way these benchmarks are not very useful to extrapolate the game performance of the PPE - or even less all of Cell - from)

I think that you realize all of that, I just wrote it for the benefit of other readers

 

[SPM]

PS3 support now standard in Linux 2.6 kernel

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6521115697.html

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Are there any performance comparisons, probably rather subjective, between Fedorra and YDL? How do they compare?

 

[ERP]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong (and this is not a console war thing at all) but isn't the PPE in 360's CPU less powerful then CELL's PPE? If CELL's PPE is around the speed of a 1.6Ghz G5 or 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 can we extrapolate what each of 360's PPE's would compare to?

There are a lot of subtle differences between them and they obviously have different memory interfaces. All of which will affect performance.

 

[SPM]

Are there any performance comparisons, probably rather subjective, between Fedorra and YDL? How do they compare?

I doubt if there is any difference in performance at the moment. YDL is based on Fedora anyway, so there are a lot of similarities. There could be a small speed advantage in YDL's favour if YDL was compiled with PPE optimisations rather than for generic PPC, but I don't think this has happened yet, and I don't think it will be that much of an improvement anyway - probably around the same as the difference between i386 and i686 optimised code running on an i686. YDL I think has conveniently packaged Cell development libraries, although you should be able to download them for Fedora as well. YDL may also support PS3 specific hardware drivers better in future - if and when Sony gets around to releasing them. Also the PS3 kernel extensions are likely to be compiled into YDL already by default, while on Fedora, it won't be - and will have to be enabled in the kernel configuration and the new kernel recompiled and installed manually. Having the PS3 extensions in the mainstream kernel is a huge boost for Fedora and other distros on the PS3 since the extensions won't have to be patched into the kernel source code and configured by the end user, which risks clashing with other patches, and risks being broken with future kernel revisions.

Fedora is a big distro which means wider community support, documentation etc. It also runs on a large number of different platforms, so you may prefer it if you like to run the same distro on your PC and PS3. Fedora is also more cutting edge in terms of the software versions and packages included - especially for networking, communications, security, server, and database applications since Fedora is the desktop/testing version of the commercial RedHat Enterprise Linuxserver OS.

Another distro worth a look at is Gentoo which is a source code distribution, so you can compile everything with PPE optimisations right now (if they exist yet in the GCC compiler). You need a high GQ (geek quotient) to install it though with everything freshly compiled from source.

 

[Asher]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong (and this is not a console war thing at all) but isn't the PPE in 360's CPU less powerful then CELL's PPE?

Generally, it's vice versa...not taking into account XDR vs GDDR3.

 

[Graham]

[edit]

mistakenly posted in the wrong thread, had 3 tabs open to the forums


Damnit. Now humf has gone and locked the one I was going to post a funny picture in

I am sad now.
After spending 20 minutes making it and all

 

[MechanizedDeath]

Someone should port BeOS to Cell. Not that I've ever actually used it, but from all I read on it over the years, it's a good, little OS. PEACE.

 

[SPM]

Gentoo Linux installation procedure on PS3

http://whitesanjuro.googlepages.com/

Be warned however that Gentoo is a geek distro that downloads compiles and installs Linux from source code. Installation requires a lot of command line use, a lot of time, and a lot of reading the installation procedure. However you can pick and choose exactly what you want to include, you can include compiler optimisations for your specific CPU variant, and you can use the latest up to the minute bleeding edge versions of installation packages.

 

[patsu]

Speaking of Linux usage, has anyone installed a larger and faster HDD on their PS3 to improve load time ? Will a 7200rpm HDD cause heat problem ?

I also remember someone installed a 3.5" HDD to his PS3 via a long SATA cable. Is that feasible ?

 

[Carl B]

Speaking of Linux usage, has anyone installed a larger and faster HDD on their PS3 to improve load time ? Will a 7200rpm HDD cause heat problem ?

I had a 20GB 2MB cache drive, and went to a 120GB 8MB cache drive - so I've seen improvement for sure. The 60GB drive though is 8MB to begin with, so I guess the options for increased performance are 16MB cache or 7200RPM spin. I've heard heat build-up increases appreciably, but it's all totally anecdotal and who knows what's what these days.

I also remember someone installed a 3.5" HDD to his PS3 via a long SATA cable. Is that feasible ?

Very feasible, but not my thing to have a non-enclosured HDD external to the system.

 

[popper]

Someone should port BeOS to Cell. Not that I've ever actually used it, but from all I read on it over the years, it's a good, little OS. PEACE.

it appears if your ready to help out and put the work in, you could compile the open version of it for that ps3 if you wanted.

http://haiku-os.org/build_factory/

im pritty sure if you could get the original PPC cd version it might also be possible to install that in some fashion... (make your own loader etc).

if you like hacking around theres also 'AROS' the open Amiga OS is also coming along nicely ,theres a ppc self hosted version already... as well as the linux hosted version
http://aros.sourceforge.net/pictures/screenshots/

theres even several Bounties you might take up and earn a few £££ while having fun...
http://www.thenostromo.com/teamaros2/
http://aros-exec.org/modules/news/

 

[Hale]

So which codecs and at what resolution is PS3 under Linux able to decode now?