> ken mays wrote: > >> The Sony PS3 can be obtained for <=$399 USD and you >> get a nice Blu-ray player tossed in for free. The >> 'free' Blu-Ray player and Nvidia RSX GPU are more than >> worth the price of admission here in the long term and >> as a feasible solution. Both the old and new Mac Mini >> runs about $499 USD and has far less capabilities in >> key areas. > > I've mentioned this in the past, but one of the biggest challenges with a > port > to PS3, Power6, or any other multi-CPU/multi-core PPC environment is that > Solaris at present assumes a processor with strong memory ordering. > > The current PPC work doesn't run into issues because the ODW is single CPU, > single threaded but to go beyond that a fair amount of work would need to be > done to add appropriate memory synchronization instructions to Solaris > (isync/sync/eieio), particularly in the case of DMA transfers.
Sequential consistency and instruction order issues across threads is very non-trivial. Millions of dollars of R&D required. Dennis Clarke
