TECH: 1 TFLOP computing for home gaming...

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Aug 06 2002 - 23:54:03 MDT


Though I'm not sure it makes me happy (due to potential
for colonizations for PVNs and subversion by amoral AIs)
it looks like we will have ~1 TFLOP game consoles by 2005.

See:
Playstation 3 chip nears completion
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,,t275,00.html

or Slashdot discussion:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/06/1433253?mode=thread?tid=137

The there are few details on the architecture available, it
looks to be positioned between a Power PC architecture (2 CPUs)
and the Blue Gene chips (probably many CPUs). Of course it
is getting kind of hard at this point to differentiate between
ALUs and CPUs (composed of a variety of ALUs).

It looks like they are trying to make the "cells" in the
Playstation 3 chips blur the distinction between ALUs and CPUs.

Robert

For the non-computer literate...
TFLOP = Teraflop (10^12 instructions/sec)
Human brain power is probably ~a petaflop (10^15 instructions/sec)
CPU = central processing unit
ALU = arithmetic logic unit
PVN = private virtual network



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