On Nov 27, 2005, at 2:57 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
> There's a lot of rumor about the Cell Processor being researched by
> IBM/Toshiba/Sony for their next PS3 platform:
> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars
> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html
>
> What about Solaris 10 on such a platform?
> What the goods and bads?
The biggest drawback is that Cell is NOT designed as a general purpose
computing processor, but as a very specialized processor for video
game usage.
While it may be possible to run Solaris on such a system, none of the
specialized
DSP cores would be used for anything without writing custom code
especially to
run on them. In PowerPC-speak, this is like the AltiVec vector
processor;
without custom code it doesn't make a difference whether a processor
has AltiVec
or not.
In short, it would be doable but it's questionable whether Solaris
would run
any faster than or even as fast as it would on a vanilla MPC750-class
machine, and
there's always the issues of trying to get device drivers to work
with the
proprietary, undocumented hardware that will form the basis of the
PS3, not to
mention the TSM modules Sony will undoubtedly require to be properly
initialized
before ANYTHING will run on the PS3.
William Kucharski
william.kucharski at sun.com
