@benjojo I tried to do a master's thesis on one but they were way too fuckin hard to program

@jordan @benjojo I did thesis work on a few of them. The difficulty of programming gave me my thesis topic, actually. I wrote a compute kernel scheduler for high-performance science work. In the end, the project used OpenCL on Apple computers, and not the Cell, but the Cell gave me the inspiration I needed to do the work.

It's clear that Sony regretted the "Other OS" thing almost immediately. I think it was only a year or two later that they took it away. In the server room, there was also an IBM server that had a couple Cell processors in it, so I could use that.

@hpux735 @benjojo I chickened out and took comps instead :D

@benjojo ISTR them being hooked up to a few BOINC projects, I think one of the clusters was doing Science at one point.

@benjojo I was tempted to play with Cell for DSP things, but then I discovered just how terrible the memory bandwidth was and it'd have been a pain _for audio_. That was also just after the era of Itanic supercomputers which only worked because Intel subsidised the machines and heavily funded teams to make software not horrifically slow on them.

@benjojo I knew someone who was attempting to use a mini cluster of them to run something like John the Ripper. Also to try to generate rainbow tables.

I am however not entirely sure how useful they were for that in the end.

@benjojo I'm not sure they were super useful on their own, but I think this got people thinking about big.LITTLE CPU designs in the ARM world and about using GPUs for generic parallel compute which is driving so much tech today. Between Cell and Larabee the industry got an object lesson on what works and what doesn't for this kind of data processing and tooling to handle it.

@benjojo enough to make the USAF get one, I guess.

Apparently, it was worth the hassle for foldingAThome as well

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

"As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer."

@benjojo there's always xbox series x "Dev Mode Activation". but also, the hardware is a lot less interesting.

@ar @benjojo Dev Mode on Xbox has limitations similar to OtherOS on PS3 - you can launch stuff in Shared Resource Access environment which has a lot less resources available

https://xboxoneresearch.github.io/wiki/operating-system/xbox-operating-system/

@benjojo
I thik that's not a good example, because it was weird back then too.

IIRC it was Sony's experiment to see if it will keep people from looking for exploits (which it did)

@benjojo Totally agree!

It _was_ a great demonstration, because the bastards took it away in subsequent firmware updates, and that should be the object lesson in how we got here - they. took. it. away.

@benjojo @notecharlie I'd say "remember what they took from us" but I never downloaded the poison-pill update soooo... 😀

(But yeah, I'd love to run general-purpose operating systems on modern gaming platforms. 🙄😒)