Originally posted by: Leros
The way the Cell processor is designed only the power processing element can be used to run an OS. The 8 Synergistic Processing Elements are useless for doing anything but floating point calculations.
That's absolutely not true. The 'SPE's are very very fast at integer math and other such things. They just accel at floating point. Just because your very very good at one thing doesn't mean that your not good at other stuff.
And they are VERY aviable to Linux. Linux is what makes the Cell even possible in things like HPC and scientific computing. Any application in Linux can take advantage of the SPE any time they feel like it.
The problem with using them is that applications and libraries have to be optimized to use the SPEs and that requires some reprogramming. Compiler optimizations help some, for instance GCC has been heavily worked on by IBM so that it can do 'vectorization', that is it has limited ability to detect were code can be parrellized in traditionally single threaded application to get some benifit from multiple cpus. Of course this effect is very small in most applications.
The PPC part of the Cell processor is not that fast by itself. You would be better off putting Linux on an older computer than the PS3.
It's not fast, but it's not slow either. It'll be about the same as a 1.5ghz G5 proccessor, which isn't slow. And supports the IBM equivelent to 'hyper threading' and supports Altivec extensions, which helps out some for multimedia apps.
The thing that hurts Linux most on the PS3 is that you only have framebuffer access to the video card, at least that is my understanding. So it's useless for gaming.
(and limited RAM is going to hurt performance for full desktops, badly)
If you want to play video games, but you would like to have a desktop to hook up to your HDTV then it makes a lot more sense to buy a PS3 then a gaming XP MCE computer or a Xbox.
The thing is is that Linux on the PS3 will be used by people who buy the thing for gaming. Having a Linux desktop is just a nice bonus.
It gives you the ability to play videos off the internet, play music, download stuff, rip cdroms, play gaming emulators, do your homework, etc etc. Which is something you can't do with other devices, at least not nearly to the same extent.
