An Afternoon Discussion: PS3's Cell Supercomputer: Can the Xbox 360 Really Compete?

DATE: February 20, 2007 @ Noon
LOCATION: Kilcawley Center, Room 2068


PRESENTATIONS
SPEAKERS:
  • Shaun Canavan
  • Trevor Watkins
  • Mark Welton
  • Cameron Hughes


ARTIFACTS:




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PS3: RESISTANCE: FALL OF MAN

XBOX 360: GEARS OF WAR





PS3''s Reality Synthesizer vs. Xbox 360's ATI: Head 2 Head Comparison


by Shaun Canavan

Today game consoles are not just for gaming. The PS3's new broadband cell processor can be used for general computing loaded with LINUX and some very powerful applications:

  • speech recognition
  • ray tracing
  • visualization

It's a supercomputer “on the cheap”.

We will compare the processing power of the PS3 and Xbox 360 in a head-2-head comparison of CPUs and GPUs:

  • PS3's Broadband Cell processor vs. Xbox 360's Xenon processor
  • PS3's Reality Synthesizer vs. Xbox 360's ATI

The presentation will include a comparison of:

  • pipelines
  • processor speed
  • memory
  • processor cores
  • architectures

How to install Linux on the PS3


by Trevor Watkins

LINUX is the open source operating system to be used for development on the PS3.

We will present a step-by-step installation of LINUX on the PS3.

This presentation will include:

  • What utilities are required
  • Where to find the software

Parallel Computing on the PS3


by Cameron Hughes

The PS3 has one PPE, nine SPE processors, and support for two instructions sets, one capable of vector/SIMD processing. In order to take advantage of the advance processing power of the CELL, it requires parallel programming.

We will present how set up your PS3 for parallel computing.

This presentation will include:

  • several ways to perform parallel computing on the PS3.