Well the airforce did build a PS3 supercomputer

True fact!

As a side note, I’ve been learning about how weird the ps3 cell architecture is, and why it’s so hard to emulate.

IIRC the hardest thing about PS3 emulation was the fact that Cell was an 8 core cpu, and at the time of PS3’s release, single core CPUs were still very dominant, and even years after the PS3s release only dual core CPUs had become a thing, with the bleeding edge just getting into 4 cores.

The 8 “cores” were co-processors, so not really cores the way we think about them now.

The architecture is unconventional because the bus design to move data between the these and the gpu is very fast, but had a weird pipeline to determine how to route that data.

Apparently it’s a very difficult thing to reproduce in a virtual environment.

And then Sony discontinued support for running Linux on the PS3 even though it was an advertised feature and many universities made PS3 clusters.

so it was, thnx!