2009/7/8 Mullin9 <[email protected]>:

> OOPS I though I could fit the ROM to PS3, and give it more RAM, It
> didn't work like I expected it would,
> I wanted to Make a Faster-than-G5 PPC Computer, it was a dud. too
> mismatched to work at all

To be honest, if you even *thought* that such things could be done,
you don't have anything /approaching/ the level of knowledge to even
attempt to do it.

One instance out of hundreds: what do you think the code in a system's
ROM *does*? What is it actually there for?

The code in a computer's firmware is there to initialise the hardware
in the system, test it and then bring it to a known state, then load
an operating system from storage and start it running. This means that
you can't simply take the ROMs out of one machine and put them in
another, because the code will not work on hardware other than that
which it is designed for. To give a facetiously trivial example, if
the Mac firmware expects the graphics card's framebuffer to be located
at &86F0000 in the memory map, and it doesn't find the framebuffer
there, it will fail.

There is little to no resemblance between the hardware of a PS3 and
that of a Mac G5. Porting the OS from one to the other would be a
massive undertaking involving many man-years of effort.

But even setting aside all this, you seem to believe that the Cell
processor is faster than the G5. It isn't. Cell is a very specialised
tool and not a terribly good fit for a videogame console, for
starters. It's not a very fast PowerPC. It's not PowerPC at all; it's
merely a relative. It couples a PowerPC-like core with a bunch of very
simple, very specialised sub-processors called SPs. These are not
PowerPCs; they are very much simpler than that and can only run
certain simple specialised tasks. They cannot run PowerPC code.

Cell can be very capable for certain types of task where the
calculation can be split up into 6-8 little chunks which can run in
parallel on the SPs. Most ordinary computer code cannot, though.

You can think of Cell as being a little like one fairly low-powered
chip, similar to a PowerPC, coupled with a tiny computer grid of half
a dozen ARM processors, which can be used to accelerate a few specific
tasks such as MP3 coding, movie transcoding and stuff like that - and
*nothing else*. For general purposes, they are useless.


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