nicky6;275251 Wrote: > Tah for the URL. > Multithreading isn't something that came with the PS3 as standard then? > ;) Of course I want to play music and movies at the same time (but not > at the same places) :) But I never thought that a computer of modern > days actually wouldn't be able to do that. Are you sure? If so, why? 8 > processors should account for something? Or is it the RAM that's the > limiting factor?
It isn't really 8 processors in the normal sense. It is one main CPU and 7 slaves. The slave CPU's are interesting in that they do not have direct access to the main bus (everything must go through the main CPU), but they all share a common memory pool as well as their own memory. So the main CPU can pass off subjobs to the slaves by writing into the shared memory, and a free slave can pull a task off the queue and write results back. The catch is that of the slaves, 1 is reserved for the PS3 OS itself, and an application (ie, a game) gets to use the main CPU and the other 6 slaves. In the world of gaming, predictable latency is an absolute: it would suck to have 60fps suddenly drop down to 30fps when you were playing music because some of the slaves were busy. Or a big lag spike between tracks as the database updated... If you managed to install Linux on an Xbox360, you would have the same problem: game developers have been told they can use all 3 cores of the CPU, and you can't have one. Multitasking is -not- the same as hardware virtualization, and hardware virtualization on consoles doesn't exist (again, "predictable latency" is a must for games, and you can't get that unless you have more CPU than the target system... so a PS3 with a second Cell, and twice the ram, sure, you can run GTA4 at full speed with all the RAM and CPU it wants as well as other apps, but that doesn't exist.) -- snarlydwarf ------------------------------------------------------------------------ snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=44177 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
