frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3
126•adamwk•4d ago

Comments

amelius•8h ago
Can it run deep learning workloads?
nxobject•8h ago
The PS3 was used a few time in clusters – some NN work was done on it back in the day. My understanding (somewhat echoed in TFA) is that when programming Cell, you really needed to think about communication patterns to avoid quickly running into memory bandwidth limitations, especially given memory hierarchy and bus quirks.

https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/629/

cogman10•8h ago
For a while, it was a major player in protein folding. I remember the PS3 was particularly apt at doing that sort of work.
Tuna-Fish•6h ago
For it's day, it packed a lot of compute into cheap package, so long as you could do something useful with a data set that fit into 256kB, the size of the local memory buffer on each SPE. If you overflowed that, the anemic system bandwidth would make it suck. Protein folding was an example of a problem that back then used tons of compute but could be fit into small space.
specialp•4h ago
It was the biggest contributor to folding @ home at one point. It came bundled with the PS3 and played relaxing music and showed a heat map of the world ps3 compute nodes as it went on. There was also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
867-5309•2h ago
they've also been used for crypto mining/cracking
maximilianburke•8h ago
Eugh, maybe?

The PS3 only had 256mb of main memory so you'd be pretty limited there. Memory bandwidth, great at the time, is pretty poor by today's standards (25 gb/s)

russell_h•7h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
duskwuff•6h ago
It's a nearly 20 year old gaming console. Even if you could port a deep learning workload to run efficiently on the Cell architecture, it would be thoroughly outclassed by a modern cell phone (to say nothing of a desktop computer).
zorgmonkey•4h ago
With enough effort you could definitely do it. Just remember it is a device that came out in 2006 and it has 256MB of system RAM and 256MB of VRAM, at best you're running a quite small model after a lot work trying to port some inference code to CELL processors. Honestly it does sound a cool excuse to write code for the CELL processors, but don't expect amazing performance or anything.
eek2121•7h ago
So, I'd have to dig through some older notes I have, however, some of this information seems inaccurate based upon my own interpretation of the specs (and writing code...specifically, but not limited to, the PowerPC part). A suggestion from me is to provide sources, and also maybe an epub of this.
flipacholas•7h ago
Please see this: https://github.com/flipacholas/Architecture-of-consoles

> A suggestion from me is to provide sources, and also maybe an epub of this

What do you mean?

rideontime•7h ago
It seems they missed this. https://payhip.com/copetti
flipacholas•2h ago
That was a small fundraiser started to convert all articles into epubs, finished in 2022
RiverCrochet•7h ago
> The EIB is made of twelve nodes called Ramps, each one connecting one component of Cell... Having said that, instead of recurring to single bus topologies (like the Emotion Engine and its precursor did), ramps are inter-connected following the token ring topology, where data packets must cross through all neighbours until it reaches the destination (there’s no direct path).

I knew IBM was involved in the design of the Cell BE, but I had no idea some successor of IBM's token ring tech (at least the concept of it) lived on in it. I'm sure there's other hardware (probably mainframe hardware) in and before that 2006 with similar interconnects.

wmf•7h ago
The EIB has nothing to do with 1980s Token Ring and this is arguably a mistake in the article. It's just a ring topology.
MBCook•4h ago
I suspect it’s an attempt at a metaphor that isn’t clearly marked as such.
rtpg•2h ago
I remember hearing somebody talk about programming hot loops in either the the PS3 or PS2 in Excel, to get a good handle on the concurrency question by having assembler in multiple columns next to each other
nickpsecurity•2h ago
Sounds like a Gantt chart with code might fit.
xgkickt•2h ago
That would be the PS2’s VUs which had an upper and lower pipe and it was easier to write instructions for each in separate columns. Then in one SDK we received program called vcl which took a single list of instructions, doing all the pipelining for you, as well as optimizing loops and assigning registers automatically. It was a godsend.
mabster•1h ago
I can't remember the details because we coded the SPU in C, but the PS3 SPUs had odd and even cycles with different access properties too.
lepicz•2h ago
i did a bit dev on ps3 and i remember there was a small memory on the chip, like 256k that was accessible to programmer.

i always found this very appealing, having a blazing fast memory under programmer control so i wonder: why don't we have that on other cpus?

bitwize•1h ago
The TI-99/4A had 256 BYTES (128 words) of static RAM available to the CPU. All accesses the 16K of main memory had to be done through the video chip. This made a lot of things on the TI-99/4A slow, but there were occasional bits of brilliance where you see a tiny bit of the system it could've been. Thanks to the fast SRAM and 16-bit CPU, the smooth scrolling in Parsec was done entirely in software—the TMS9918A video chip lacking scroll registers entirely.
jl6•15m ago
I remember discussion at the time about how the PS3 was a uniquely difficult architecture to emulate. Was that true? Have those difficulties now been overcome? I see RPCS3 exists but I’ve no idea if it has done the difficult parts.

StageConnect: Behringer protocol is open source

https://github.com/OpenMixerProject/StageConnect
29•jdboyd•1h ago•3 comments

Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
668•ctoth•13h ago•654 comments

New Work by Gary Larson

https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff
205•jkestner•9h ago•41 comments

The Unix Executable as a Smalltalk Method [pdf]

https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/onward25-jakubovic.pdf
63•pcfwik•5h ago•6 comments

AMD's Chiplet APU: An Overview of Strix Halo

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/amds-chiplet-apu-an-overview-of-strix
10•zdw•2h ago•0 comments

The pivot

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
265•AndrewDucker•11h ago•120 comments

Live Stream from the Namib Desert

https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2025/10/live-stream-from-namib-desert.html
453•surprisetalk•18h ago•86 comments

PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3
126•adamwk•4d ago•24 comments

Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support

https://aiven.io/blog/exploring-postgresql-18-new-uuidv7-support
206•s4i•2d ago•152 comments

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
495•weinzierl•13h ago•273 comments

If the Gumshoe Fits: The Thomas Pynchon Experience

https://www.bookforum.com/print/3202/if-the-gumshoe-fits-62416
21•prismatic•1w ago•0 comments

WebMCP

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/WebMCP
70•sanj•8h ago•19 comments

Show HN: ServiceRadar – open-source Network Observability Platform

https://github.com/carverauto/serviceradar
24•carverauto•5h ago•1 comments

EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars

https://restofworld.org/2025/ev-depreciation-blusmart-collapse/
318•belter•20h ago•733 comments

Tahoe's Elephant

https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/12/last-week-on-my-mac-tahoes-elephant/
28•GavinAnderegg•5d ago•18 comments

The Rapper 50 Cent, Adjusted for Inflation

https://50centadjustedforinflation.com/
587•gaws•14h ago•156 comments

4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence

https://alecmuffett.com/article/117792
370•alecmuffett•23h ago•484 comments

The Majority AI View

https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/
23•Bogdanp•2h ago•7 comments

Asking AI to build scrapers should be easy right?

https://www.skyvern.com/blog/asking-ai-to-build-scrapers-should-be-easy-right/
95•suchintan•11h ago•44 comments

The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

https://www.wired.com/2003/05/wifirevolution/
71•Cieplak•5d ago•48 comments

Spray Cooling – Recreating Supercomputer Cooling on a Desktop CPU [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEBSuk20gvc
6•zdw•5d ago•4 comments

Cyberpsychology's Influence on Modern Computing

https://cacm.acm.org/research/cyberpsychologys-influence-on-modern-computing/
7•pseudolus•5d ago•0 comments

Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments

https://www.aiengineering.report/p/claude-code-vs-codex-sentiment-analysis-reddit
88•waprin•1d ago•37 comments

PSOS-C and the Full Attribution Chain

https://www.aivojournal.org/closing-the-loop/
3•businessmate•6d ago•1 comments

When if is just a function

https://ryelang.org/blog/posts/if-as-function-blogpost-working-on-it_ver1/
39•soheilpro•3d ago•43 comments

Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/amazons-ring-to-partner-with-flock-a-network-of-ai-cameras-used...
498•gman83•21h ago•435 comments

MIT physicists improve the precision of atomic clocks

https://news.mit.edu/2025/mit-physicists-improve-atomic-clocks-precision-1008
78•pykello•6d ago•34 comments

Intercellular communication in the brain through a dendritic nanotubular network

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr7403
269•marshfram•15h ago•214 comments

Researchers Discover the Optimal Way to Optimize

https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-discover-the-optimal-way-to-optimize-20251013/
37•jnord•4d ago•8 comments

Smithsonian Open Access

https://www.si.edu/openaccess
61•bookofjoe•3d ago•9 comments