What made the PS3 useful in super computing and why didn’t the PS4 find the same use?
In: Technology
Developer here,
The PS3 used a Cell processor – the details aren’t important, but it was mostly a math processor, pretty powerful for its time, and most importantly, cheap.
The PS4 is an Intel x86 processor just like in your desktop and laptop. It’s the same processor as found in the current generation Xbox. The math processing power is in a video card found in the console.
Basically the cost and common architecture made it no longer competitive in this application. I can buy x86 CPUs en masse from anywhere. If you wanted to use the Cell processor, it wasn’t a generally available CPU. You could special order them and develop your own hardware platform, or you can just buy a bunch of PS3’s. But now days if you wanted to build a cheap number cruncher, you would invest in GPUs. And you don’t need latest and greatest, power consumption is the biggest concern of modern super computing.
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