First one to render on Cell wins

[davidaleon]

Now here is a geniunely crazy, but geniunely great idea. Why not render on PlayStation 3 and XBox 2.

I've been following the Cell saga for the past two weeks very, very closely. I am truly skeptical that the chip can truly perform 256 billion floating point opperations per second. Nevertheless, it should be several times more powerful than the current render champ: Intel Xeon. When you pack that into a cheap $400 or $500 PS3 or XBox2, you will have awesome power at a pittance.

I have read several stories where various universities around the world have networked PS2 Linux/Beawulf clusters to do many computationally outragious problems. It worked inspite of the 32MB limit on ram.

So why not port Brazil to PS3 and XBox? You could give us phenominal access to phenominal power at a phenominal price and win the game.

[paulison]

Re: First one to render on Cell wins

So why not port Brazil to ...

and vray

[RErender]

lol

really though I am hoping this will force Intel and AMD to produce some real multi cores instead of the sissy two core procs they've been bragging about

[super gnu]

theyd have to work pretty damn hard. i read a partial translation of the patent application for cell.
its a beast.

estimated performance of one cell chip is equivalent to 10 3 gig opterons (not even available yet) and the damn ps3 has four (4!) of the bastards in! sooo, one ps3 is gonna render as fast as, errr, our entire renderfarm at work. bloody hell.

even if they are exaggerating by a factor of 2 its still amazingly fast.


ibm (codesigners with sony) have apparently tested a rackmount workstation with 64 cell processors. i cant even be bothered to work out how fast that would render, but i can see realtime gi being fairly easy.

also heard hints apple may have a deal on using the chip, singe the controller part of cell is actually very similar to g5 processor. (imagine the ads if apple actually DID have the "worlds fastest home pc" they could fire their entire overpaid ads dept and actually just tell the truth! wierd.)


from what ive seen of intel/amd's plans, they cant come close in the next five years unless they start from scratch.


so yes, rendering on cell would be fantastic. it runs linux amongst other things, but i cant see it ever running windows tbh, too much politics.

SOOO, can discreet please port max to linux, and can chaosgroup do a version of vray to match? id love it if i could replace my whole office with a box the size of a book.

(with that much render juice, Maxwell would actually be usable! imagine that! )

i should buy some shares in ibm methinks, have u notice they are

a) pushing linux
b) sold off their entire pc division to a chinese company
c) developing a pc crushing processor that runs linux

i think they have big plans.

[percydaman]

how they can stick one or more of these chips into a ps3 and call it affordable is beyond me....

[tammo]

super gnu,
i think you are right about the share buying.
analysts have also set IBM to "buy" status a few days ago.

[tammo]

if the cell is really so fast there will be some windows emulators soon.

[davidaleon]

I seriously doubt that Discreet will ever port Max to any platform that will support Cell. As has been noted so many times, the thing that makes Max cool and easy to use is it's *_almost perfect_* Windows XP integration. We never run into the kinds of configuration issues which plague Maya and XSI and Houdini users because no effort is made to abstract the software from the system. It's usually the drive toward platform independence that gets most companies in trouble.

I think the key is to exploit the Cell as a render node. Since VRay.exe is supposed to run under Linux and be somewhat independent, running as a network service, why not make it run on PS3?

I've only recently started reading the published reports that PS3 is supposed to have 4 of these Cell chips in a single box. That is just mind-boggling. I have no clue what in the world could require that power besides 3d rendering and complex climate models. Unless you are modeling reality in some capacity, that much power is almost silly.

VLADO! PLEASE HELP US! WE NEED THIS CHIP! I would love to use VRay as my only production engine. It's been my favorite engine for a long time. Yet, I can't say "no" to the performance delta that Cell will bring. Let's get VRay and Cell together and have a nice wedding cerimony. You can take over control of the world with this one.

[Lucetius]

I prefer furby's

Rendering on a PS2 would be cool

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/index.php

but I think I prefer furby's.

http://www.trygve.com/furbeowulf.html

[dennis]

imagine the cool network games that could be played at the renderfarm then....a small lan/render party..

then again i would never meet a dealine...hmmm

[jujubee]

If I can recall properly, the way the old Iraqi government in the late 90s got around the embargo restrictions on the import of more powerful computers was to import playstations from Japan...

[RErender]

lol, I never heard that, gives new meaning to "want to play a game?"

[percydaman]

haha good one... its apropos on so many levels....