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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

For the most part the cluster of PS3s supercomputer was a myth used to hype up how powerful the PS3 was. The amount of RAM per compute was so low that it limited the type of workloads it was good at. Then server CPUs became more powerful as the PS3 processor stayed the same.

However PS3 clusters did find niche success as a super computer. There are a handful of notable examples. The fastest one ever built was by the US Airforce, consisted of 1,760 PS3s, and was the 33rd fastest super computer at the time. It was used for satellite image processing.

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When I was paying attention during the 90s and 2000s I remember this being the hype in magazines / on the web for pretty much EVERY upcoming console. Namely that it was so outrageously powerful that it might be considered a supercomputer in its own right. Needless to say, I was hyped up and obsessing about them myself.

Let's not forget the Japanese government applying export restrictions on the PS2 because it might be powerful enough to be used for military purposes [1]. It even went so far as claims that Iraq ordered a bunch of them for that purpose [2]. That's some serious hype marketing haha.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/716237.stm

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_playst...

And that is how you support your local industry.

There was a time when supercomputers had no GPUs. Nowadays the top list is all GPu accelerators.

I always thought it was a bit odd that we went from super-compute clusters built out of PS3 to the PS4/Xbone generation consoles being meh-grade laptop chips in a fancy case.

It's the performance vs programmability tradeoff.

The article references it.

As one goes back in console history, the performance to achieve contemporarily visually-stunning results required exotic architectures + hand-tuned code.

Over time, state of the art PC + GPU hardware improved, to the point there wasn't a functional difference vs exotic architectures. Additionally, the cost of developing leading-edge custom architectures exploded.

Microsoft really pushed this with the original "PC in a box" XBox, but you saw the console OEMs outsource increasing parts of their chip solutions after that.

Why keep / buy entire chip design teams, when AMD will do it for you?

Especially if the performance difference is negligible.

The article also references the cost of developing a AAA "HD" title is so high that it pretty much needs to be released on multiple platforms to be profitable.

PS3 was popular for compute clusters because it was sold heavily at cost at launch. That's typical for a console where the platform owner gets a slice of all software sales, but makes no sense for a general computing platform. The performance/$ was unbeatable because the economics were perverted.

The PS4 was sold at break even price and couldn't run unsigned code anyway.

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