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Sunday Comics: Dead Island
Rumours are circulating today about the death of IBM’s Cell processor, which powers Sony’s PlayStation 3. Kotaku spoke to IBM about the fate of the Cell and its commitment to the PlayStation 3.
An estimated 4000 IBM employees have been laid off in the last week, as the company adjusts to the current way of the world. Why do we care? Because IBM make a lot of stuff.
It’s a seesaw. Somedays playing World of Warcraft is good, good, good. Somedays it’s bad, bad, bad. What about today?
Pandemic PS3 coder Tony Albrecht already has a unique unit of measurement, called the “Tony”, for explaining the differences in processing power between the major consoles. He even went so far as to break it down for the less technically-minded.
Now, I think Tony units are great. Albrecht however felt a deeper understanding of where the consoles sit on the grunt scale was required, so he went and compared the latest generation of gaming platforms with the planet’s fastest supercomputer – the IBM Roadrunner. His findings are fascinating:
The United States’ nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos will soon be monitored by a powerful computer made out of parts you might have in your living room – the PlayStation 3′s Cell processor. Nicknamed the Roadrunner, the IBM-built supercomputer is comprised completely of off-the-shelf components, including nearly 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors. The machine can process more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the world’s current fastest computer, IBM’s Blue Gene.
If only we had had access to this sort of technology back in 1983. The movie WarGames would have been so much better. “Would you like to play a game? How about Resistance: Fall of Man?”
IBM unveils fast new computer for US Energy Dept. [Newsday.com]
President and CEO of Double Fusion, Jonathan Epstein put all the other GDC rock gods to shame this week at IBM’s Guitar Hero Competition. Epstein won the $US 1,500 grand prize with his face melting rendition of Eric Johnson’s White Cliffs of Dover. According tho the short press release, you can challenge Epstein to an epic battle of the bands by going to Double Fusion’s website. I went there myself and didn’t really see a place to sign up per se, but I suppose an email will do nicely. Just don’t count on wrestling that $US 1,500 from him. I think the title will be the best you can hope for.
