What to tell a PS3 cell-processor fanboy

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 4:07 pm

A friend of mine is a huge console gamer, and is a huge fan of the PS3. That's cool, but he's now taking over a big portion of the IT work at his parent's business, and in the past I've heard him say things about buying PS3s instead of quad-core PCs for usage as servers, because \"they're really supercomputers, you know\" and \"the cell processor is more powerful\", citing the number of cells, etc.

I've told him he's wrong, and pointed out the difference in F@H production, but he writes it off by disclaimers about the developers having a hard time programming for the cell, or PS3 being bottlenecked by its lack of RAM (both of which are true to an extent).

I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything really definitive and not too technical that I can point him to. Any suggestions?

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 4:26 pm

Grin wickedly, then punch yourself in the face. For great laughs throw in a silly hat.

You can't argue with fanboys. Any arguments they hear that doesn't confirm their worldview just makes them dig in harder.

Don't take this path dude. Just smile and nod like he's an idiot the next time he brings it up.

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 4:32 pm

When it was just his fanboyishness, it wasn't a big deal. I usually just ignored it, and ribbed him about it once in a while.

But the thing is, it's now threatening his work; I don't want to just let this cause trouble for him or his family's business.

zico · Post by **zico** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 5:13 pm

Then tell him exactly that. If he won't listen to what you actually concerns (which is better than just trying to spoil his fanboy-behaviour) then he might never listen.

If he ACTUALLY thinks like:
\"buying PS3s instead of quad-core PCs for usage as servers\" he does not really know anything about any IT infrastructures... dunno how to describe that. A server is just something very complex and server does not even say what this machine does (can be fileserver, webserver, appserver, etc, etc, etc).
PS3 on the other hand is just a device.

Cell processors can be powerful CPUs indeed, but that does not define everything.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 5:15 pm

The best way to get prevent him from doing in his parent's business is tell him he's being an idiot, but never mention the PS3.

Tell him the path he's on will hurt more people than just him.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 5:45 pm

Yep, pretty much explain to him that he is a complete idiot fanboy and should stay out of any business related to that field or he will cause a disaster. A server is more than just a CPU, just as a PS3 is more than just a Cell processor. If Cell was a real supercomputer, the PS3 would have no need for a separate dedicated GPU. Cell looked impressive way back when, but now it is barely mediocre compared to a modern PC.

Also it doesn't help in the least that the Cell is not compatible with x86 so it can't run any useful operating systems or applications outside of an emulator which is ridiculously slow on any platform.

zico · Post by **zico** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 6:44 pm

Krom wrote:Also it doesn't help in the least that the Cell is not compatible with x86 so it can't run any useful operating systems or applications outside of an emulator which is ridiculously slow on any platform.

Linux runs on Cell with no problems... where we are back to server again... well.. guess that's not the point.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:41 pm

Krom wrote:Yep, pretty much explain to him that he is a complete idiot fanboy and should stay out of any business related to that field or he will cause a disaster. A server is more than just a CPU, just as a PS3 is more than just a Cell processor. If Cell was a real supercomputer, the PS3 would have no need for a separate dedicated GPU. Cell looked impressive way back when, but now it is barely mediocre compared to a modern PC.

Also it doesn't help in the least that the Cell is not compatible with x86 so it can't run any useful operating systems or applications outside of an emulator which is ridiculously slow on any platform.

what krom said is an example of the language you should avoid using.

The problem is not the PS3. The problem is not technical in nature. The problem is the attitude of Foil's friend.

Grendel · Post by **Grendel** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:41 pm

Main problem is that the PS3 is made by Sony. They are traditionally in the \"closed system\" business and will do little or nothing to support you

(see PSP -- I'd love to program it w/o having to hack the crap out of it to get software run on it..)

Also, it's not in Sony's interest to use the PS3 for other things they designed it for, haven't checked lately but it's probably still sold cheaper than the actual cost to make it are.

Interestingly tho, IBM tells you that \"The Sony® PLAYSTATION® 3 (PS3) is the easiest and cheapest way for programmers to get their hands on the new Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE) processor and take it for a drive.\" (An introduction to Linux on the PLAYSTATION 3).

Personally I would not use the PS3 in any kind of commercial setting simply for the lack of software and support. As for any other setting -- it's probably the best performance you can get for $400 bux

(Sorry Foil, but that CPU outperforms your Quad by quite a bit

)

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:46 pm

at least you got an idea of the mountain you need to climb foil.

to reiterate:

The problem is not the PS3. The problem is not technical in nature. The problem is the attitude of Foil's friend.

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:36 am

Thanks, guys.

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:51 am

Krom wrote:...Cell looked impressive way back when, but now it is barely mediocre compared to a modern PC.

Grendel wrote:...Foil, but that CPU outperforms your Quad by quite a bit...

Can you guys clarify this? From what I can gather, the Cell is a good number-cruncher and handles single-process-multi-thread apps (e.g. games) well, but something like a PC quad-core CPU would easily beat it in a multi-process environment. They're very different, so a comparison is difficult... but couldn't one just look at overall performance in terms of FLOPS?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 9:28 am

I think in FLOPS a Cell could still be faster than even the latest Intel CPUs. But Intel CPUs are better at integer performance and in FLOPS a modern GPU is faster than Cell.

Also the focus on many \"server\" computers is not massive compute power but massive very fast storage and I/O. Something a PS3 has absolutely none of. No matter how fantastic the processor is, it can't make up for lack of large redundant high speed RAID arrays, multi-gigabytes of memory and fast network ports.

If he was running a render farm it might be a different story, but thanks to modern GPUs from both ATI and Nvidia you can build a number crunching or rendering farm of far greater performance in much less space than a bunch of PS3s would take.

Kyouryuu · Post by **Kyouryuu** » Wed Oct 29, 2008 10:53 am

It's too bad we took out Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, I'm sure we could have found your friend a job in the Iraqi tech division!

Neo · Post by **Neo** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 1:51 am

heh... I hate fanboys...

I remember this one cat who kept on pimping the Sega Dreamcast or the \"Dural\" system as it was known back then.

His words were \"famous last words.\" lol

AlphaDoG · Post by **AlphaDoG** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 4:58 am

Kyouryuu wrote:It's too bad we took out Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, I'm sure we could have found your friend a job in the Iraqi tech division!

And the "left" swears there were no WMDs LMAO!

Testiculese · Post by **Testiculese** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 5:58 am

Neo wrote:heh... I hate fanboys...

Bigtime irony!

Jeff250 · Post by **Jeff250** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 7:41 pm

Foil wrote:Can you guys clarify this? From what I can gather, the Cell is a good number-cruncher and handles single-process-multi-thread apps (e.g. games) well, but something like a PC quad-core CPU would easily beat it in a multi-process environment. They're very different, so a comparison is difficult... but couldn't one just look at overall performance in terms of FLOPS?

The Cell is 1 traditional processor + 8 SPE's (7 in the case of the PS3, so that one can be bad, and they can still ship it).

The traditional processor is just a 3.2 GHz two-way multi-threaded PowerPC processor. To call the processor "multi-threaded" here is analogous to saying that it has "Hyper-Threading," except the Cell is not an Intel processor, so we don't use their trademarked name to describe it. So if you install something like Linux, it will see two logical processors belonging to the one hardware processor.

One problem with the SPE's is that, despite their number, they are designed for vector floating point math. This is good for games, but, while the SPE's are more multi-purpose than GPU's, for something like a server, having traditional processors would be much more effective unless there is a demonstrated need to be able to perform so much simultaneous floating point math.

Probably the most damning problem though is that you need to execute special instructions to the processor to use the SPE's, so any software you run on them would have to be optimized to use them. So if you just throw on a Linux server, they will be of no use, unless he wants to spend a good deal of his life hacking Apache code (or whatever) to take advantage of them. The kernel *cannot* magically schedule threads and execute PowerPC instructions on them.

So really, to install a Linux server on them is to install Linux on a box with a two-way multi-threaded 3.2 GHz PowerPC processor, unless he is going to start hacking away at code on his own time, and even then, he would still be better off using a more multi-purpose multi-core processor, unless he can demonstrate need to perform nightmarish floating point math.

Note that projects like Folding@home do require nightmarish floating point math and they do spend time writing special software to use the SPE's--this is why it works so well for them. (And ditto for games of course.)

Jeff250 · Post by **Jeff250** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 7:47 pm

So to answer your question more directly, looking at performance with respect to FLOPS is only a good determiner of performance if you are really interested in floating point operations and not interested in the others. While I suspect that the Cell, when properly programmed, would cream a Core 2 in terms of FLOPS, the question here is are FLOPS a relevant benchmark for what you need the processor to do? In this case, no.

Ferno · Post by **Ferno** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 8:50 pm

Say nothing. let him do what he likes and let him worry about the screw-ups that will arise.

let the dog catch the car.

What to tell a PS3 cell-processor fanboy

What to tell a PS3 cell-processor fanboy

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