[openbeos] Re: MIPS32 port for GSoC
- From: "Ben Allen" <ben.allen@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:50:30 -0500
On 3/18/07, Jonas Sundström <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But I'd rather have resources spent on the Playstation3,
which is available, fascinating and potentially very powerful,
and also not that expensive if you can truly use its full potential.
As an electrical engineering grad student, we have talked about and studied
the PS3's cell processor and system architecture, and the sheer power behind
it will make you drool. The downside is that you can't really "port"
software to the cell processor in the same way that you can to a Sparc, ARM,
or MIPS architecture.
The cell processor has nine cores: one master core (derivative of a PowerPC
chip) and eight specialized slave cores (with limited memory access and
functionality, for number crunching only). If you can port Haiku to a
PowerPC architecture, you can get it working on a PS3 (Sony has a
development kit available that provides some drivers too), but you lose the
true power of the cell processor. To really use the cell processor's power,
you need to rewrite your code with the nine-core architecture in mind, which
is a programming paradigm shift that very few companies (and PS3 game
makers) fully comprehend. However, if some people wanted to re-write some
of the media-oriented parts of Haiku (specifically encoders, decoders, and
parts of the GameKit) to take advantage of the cell processor (and have the
Haiku core running on just the PowerPC master core, which has been done with
Linux), Haiku could easily be the "MediaOS" in a way that the Be developers
only dreamed of. (Imagine being able to encode/decode multiple audio and
video streams in near-real time with almost no load on the processor, encode
a wav file to multiple compressed formats simultaneously and near-instantly,
or have multiple processors dedicated to intensive gaming tasks such as
collision detection and particle motion calculation)
-Ben
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