Let me tell you why the Xbox sucks their are many good reasons why one it is made by mircosoft and before all you xbox lovers scream at me think about it all Bill Gates wants is your money thats all he cares about cause he's so rich he can make a system now the xbox isnt as expensive as it use to be but why would pay around 200 dollars and an extra 30 to watch DVD's and im sure plenty of people have cd players that are way cheaper and have a computer to download music onto face it it sucks it has no good games of its own except Halo and none of its games are exclusive meaning only for xbox hell halo isnt even exclusive cause its on pc and since xbox dosent have any good games of its own it has to copy off of PS2 games by taking them enhanceing the graphics put a little bit more stuff in it and sell it on there console now is that right? no and yeah the online stuff may seem good but it cost too much like i said Xbox is only about money its a nerds system im sick of hearing things like theres no power greater or that other crap why would you buy a system created by an old nerd so before you xbox lovers scold me think about what i just said cause your being used for Bill Gates little plans
 

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Why is it so hard for the Mac community to separate a processor from a system. Yes, the Cell processor contains a general PowerPC core, and yes, it's likely that core would support enough of the ISA to run MacOS X. That doesn't mean a Playstation 3 can run MacOS X. There are chipsets, drivers, possible ABI tweaks, and other issues to deal with, and it's unlikely that, out of the box, you'd even get the Playstation 3 boot loader to successfully pull the kernel into RAM and run it without modification.

In short, yes, the Cell could probably run MacOS X, and no, the Playstation 3 probably can't.
 

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I think this is highly unlikely unless the Cell processor can emulate x86 or ppc instruction sets.

The Cell doesn't need to emulate the PPC instruction set because it is a PPC processor. More specifically, the main processor (PPE ?) is a PPC and the additional 7 or 8 coprocessors (SPEs) are basically vector processors that I believe use some subset of AltiVec and PPC as their instruction set.

This, however is irrelevant to the current story which is not even a story. Here's the quote:

The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger).

This doesn't say anything. The Cell processor will be able to support Windows as well as pretty much any operating system in existence. But that doesn't mean that these operating systems won't need to be modified to run on the Cell. Yes, Apple could patch Tiger to support the Cell processor, but the real question is, would they?

With the move to Intel the answer is probably not, but Hell has already frozen over (Intel Macs) and pigs are flying (Apple ships multi-button mouse) so anything is possible at this point. I'd love to see a Cell-based Mac as a high-end media workstation, but Apple would need to create the software to go with it (or encourage us developers to do it). You need to realize that a Cell-based Mac would not perform nearly as well as today's G5s on pretty much all currently shipping software. The Cell just isn't designed to run the software that Mac OS X has today, it's designed to process large amounts of data (images, video, physics, etc.) very quickly. Applications that can be modified (and they must be modified) to take advantage of the Cell's SPEs will see huge gains in performance and will probably easily outperform any other CPU on the market today.

The bottom line is that software will need to be written specifically for the Cell in order for it to run like lightening. It doesn't matter what operating system you can put on it (which is basically anything), software needs to be specifically tuned to take advantage of it.
 

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i just want to say wow , how you guys can break all that down and rip it apart is amazing, but what i want to know is can these kick ass consoles multitask as cpu brothers of my computer eg. i use maya and on a tight budget but ive got a ps2 and a gamecube in the house why cant i hook them both up to my mac and render farm or use the cpu's to make elaborate animations i mean from research the gc has a power pc chip and an ati card much like my mac like you said all chips are risc in some way, mmm but i suppose mips is a different story and price. thanks
 

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