BUH Blog

100 Gigaflops in the PS3?

I was pretty aware that the Cell processor (yeah - could they have found a more generic name?) from IBM was a major advance in CPU design and performance, but had no idea it was going to be at the 100 Gigaflops level. I just read that Folding@home, has announced plans to launch a service on the upcoming Sony Playstation 3. First - you have to understand that the Cell processor is going to be used in the next generation Sony Playstation - the PS3 - to be released in Nov of 2006. Next - that Folding@home is a project to study protein folding by distributing the problem across thousands of machines. Thirdly - a fast AMD Opteron processor can do about 8 to 10 gigaflops - that is 8 to 10 billion double-precision floating-point operations per second. In the article they mention that ONE PS3 will have the ability to produce 100 Gigaflops - thus equaling about 10 AMD Opterons!

I know IBM is working desktops using this chip, but I wonder if it will be cheaper to convert a PS3 into a Linux box for number crunching…