Its not strange, thats called modern technology.
Unlike nowadays where everyone needs 64GB of ram and as many cores / processors as possible (kek)
just to run chrome
lol, yea
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I don’t know if it supports either of those platforms to be honest. Pretty sure it doesen’t run on PPC thou.
That’s something that might make things better. But still I think you’d need to strip down the kernel a lot to free as much resources as possible.
You might burn one to the ground pretty fast if you plan to use it as a SWAP partition.
I never messed with that. Just plain old Ubuntu for PPC with the correct drivers for the PS3 so I could access all the RAM available to the system.
Sure it’s a very advanced processor for it’s age, but I truly feel like the RAM situation is a big limiting factor to unleash it’s true potential.
Well, the key question is whether or not the available software can keep the 256MB of memory that it has “fed”.
It may only have 256MB, but this is full speed memory. It’s works as if it were a gigantic full speed cache. This is one of the key differences of this type of chip that allows it to plow through these kinds of things so well. Everything that enters is processed and exits. Nothing lingers in memory very long, unlike in more generalized kinds of things like PC’s running Windows with all it’s features. That’s what makes this a totally different animal.
Caching, is going to be more relevant to video streaming applications that temporarily save as yet un rendered bits. That being said, a large SSD cache is a “good to have” for all kinds of other reasons.
No, not really lol.
I’m meaning if I needed it.
Yeah that was still in the hypervisor. So no full processor access. As well, Ubuntu to PPC has always been half assed at best IMO.
Ok then I figure out how to get the coprocessor’s ram tossed in too. I mean, another 512 won’t hurt.
I really doubt it’ll be an issue tbh.
Been using 5GB of my optane drive as swap on my proxmox server for over a year and life is still at 100%
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Well no because you needed to reboot the console to enter the OS and you could modify the system folder as you pleased. If it was in an hypervisor you wouldn’t have been able to mess with the host OS.
You have extensive esperience with PPC so I trust you on this.
I’m pretty sure it was structured more like 256 for the Cell and 256 for the Nvidia GPU.
I’ve never extensively analyzed a workload like that but I figure that rendering might need more than 256MB of RAM, even if it’s accessed very quickly. Since it has 7 core at it’s disposal rendering at least 7 frames at the time might use more than 36MB of RAM. If you count the server and the basic software the machine needs to run that margin shrinks quickly.
Maybe you’re not swapping as much as a PS3 used for rendering. Also, as far as I know, Optane tech is very resiliant to writes, a lot more than NAND TLC for example.
Gen 1-3 are 7 cores, 4 - 7 are all 8 cores. Gen 1-3 had one SPE disabled because of a defect. The chip is really an 8 core though. It has one PPE (Power Processing Element) that is one 3.2ghz powerpc core. Its likely a relative of the 970GX, had it ever come out labeled as that. The architecture got updated though and renamed, so I only say a relative, lol. Like I said earlier, the Slim models had the updated processor with the fixed and active SPE (Synergistic Processing Element), which I think was a media rendering core or something.
Anywayyyyyys I have a lot to work with is my point, and its a very streamlined system overall. Even if I have to strip a kernel, its not doing anything other than rendering video, so big woop. My concern is optimizing correctly for each core correctly. I can do a demo on my current PS3 which I kind of plan to fuck around with anyways, and if I like what I get I can move forward on that. If that flops, theres the accelerator, or the GPU.
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Interesting… I’d like to see where you got this info. Not because I disagree, but it does conflict with the information I’ve found about it when looking into this in the past.
In full disclosure, I worked at IBM at the time it was constructed and I helped them market the CPU as part of a volunteer program that involved displaying the raw CPU wafer’s to students to get them interested in STEM.
At the time, there was no information provided to me that any part of the manufacturing process went awry. The major controversy around it was that it was so well engineered the cost of the equipment surpassed it’s sales price by at least 2 times. It was designed to get hammered, with all the silicon binned at the highest level.
What I did read about it, later on, was that one SPE was disabled in case of fail-over due to extended use (which was never really needed). Elsewhere, I read that this SPE was not available to developers because it was used to manage Cell OS’s system level VM. I could believe any of these reports but haven’t been able to confirm any of them.
I also looked into what potential changes may have been introduced into later generations of “slim” PS3’s, in search of explicit TRIM support for SSD’s. The only reports I discovered from that search were that there were, evidently, no changes what so ever to the systems other than reduced power consumption and power supply specs.
If you still have this information, I’d be very curious to see it.
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