Re: [Chicken-users] anyone have a Playstation 3 ?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 12/20/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
> I seriously doubt that the best way to make use of all those Cell
> processing units is with any kind of threading.  I expect there's
> probably some way to more tightly synchronize their actions, when coding
> hand assembly.  I'm not interested in the Cell as some kind of
> architecture where you just forget about what you're doing, put stuff in
> threads, and hope they perform better.  That's how the XBox 360 is
> designed; its threading model is coarse and conventional.  I'm sure it
> will be popular with developers that don't want to think much about the
> architecture.  I expect, however, that the Cell has capabilities that
> can only be realized by writing very specifically for that
> architecture.  I haven't read up on the Cell enough to know what is
> possible, but I will be doing so.

Yeah, makes sense.

What other kinds of constructs can you imagine in Scheme for parallel
execution, which would work better than threads?

> > As a console it seems to be bombing so far; they are already going for
> > less than retail on ebay,
>
> Um, no.  They've been going for $1500 on e-bay.  That's 2.5 times their
> $600 retail, and almost 2 times their $800 manufacturing cost.  Sony was
> supposed to deliver 400k units at launch and has only done about 200k.
> Crimes have been committed by people to obtain them, including murder.

Right after release, yes.  Then the prices began to plummet on ebay.
(I did a search when I wrote that comment, naturally.)  Item
260068916242 is an example from today - less than retail, but prices
today seem a bit higher in general than they did on the 20th.

Today there was also this article:

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2006/12/25/people-swapping-ps3s-for-wiis/

> Besides, the Cell isn't going to be used in just the PS3.  That's just
> the cheap way to get ahold of one right now.

Yep.