[ydl-gen] Teraflop computing with the PS3.

[Laurent Desnogues]

On 10/8/07, Thomas A. McGonagle <tom at dataero.com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>  Earlier this year Wired Magazine published a one pager stating the
> computational power of various computers. If I remember correctly (I can't
> find the 1 pager on wired.com), they said that:
>    the PS3 could operate at 1.5 Teraflops
>    the XBox360 could operate at 1 Teraflops
>    430 Pentium 4 computers could operate at 1 Teraflop.
>
>  Since reading the "article" I have repeated this to anyone who would
> listen.
>
>  Upon visiting the Terrasoft website, I read that 1TFlop can theoretically
> be reached by an 8 PS3 cluster.
>
>  Would it be correct to say that one PS3 is .125(1T / 8 PS3s)  TFlops?
>
>  Also does anyone know what was wrong with that "article", or does anyone
> have it handy?

Well you have peak flops, then peak single or double precision flops.
You can also add what the GPU can achieve.  I guess the Wired
figure is Cell + RSX single-precision peak flops + marketing BS.

The Terrasoft figure looks conservative:  one SPU can do 4 macs
per cycles, which translates into 8 flops.  At 3.2 GHz, each SPU
can achieve 25 Gflops.  So 7 SPUs can reach >170 Gflops, plus
what the PPU can do, which would probably give around
200 Gflops.

HTH,

Laurent