Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[TJ Parker]

> NVDA's cards are even faster, but Xbox stinks.

ah, but what makes the playstation different is the vector units, and their accessibility to the programmer. that, plus the fact that sony wisely made linux available for the playstation long long ago (you can go buy a hard disk and boot it up and upload programs from your computer).

nvidia chips do have a cool gpu, but using that for high performance computing is something else entirely: a program running on the cpu has to take data off chip, into the gpu, and then bring it back - a big delay, and not what the chip is intended for: its intended that the data go straight through the graphics pipeline and to the display memory.

re playstation and scientific computing:
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/

> NVDA's cards are even faster, but Xbox stinks.

and, of course, xbox stinks because it comes from msft and they haven't had an original idea since, um, extortionary licensing for software, i guess. its just a clone of the playstation, and as such, will need to be better by a wide margin before it steals the market. as console gamers know: you buy the #1 system, because that will have *all* the cool games.