What made the PS3 useful in super computing and why didn’t the PS4 find the same use?
In: Technology
There were two reasons the PS3 was so useful in supercomputing. The first reason was that the Cell Processor that Sony used as the CPU in the PS3 was very good at multitasking, which made it ideal for stringing multiple PS3s together to create one very powerful device.
However, the biggest reason was cost. When the PS3 came out, it had very powerful components for the time, and to make it so that anybody could afford to buy the PS3, Sony took a huge loss on each unit, hoping to make up for that with profits from game sales. I believe the PS3 was $600 at launch, but even with a massive economy of scale it cost Sony something like $800 or $900 to build each unit. That meant that for $600 consumers could get computer components that would cost them double that or more if they bought them at retail.
So essentially the PS3 was so good for supercomputing because Sony was subsidizing your supercomputer.
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