Kev's Development Toolbox

The PS3 has already been demonstrating it’s raw computing horsepower from users donating their console’s time for Stanford’s ‘Folding@Home’ project, to process data simulating protein folding for the project. Currently the project is employing 889 TFLOPs of computing power from 36,000 PS3s. As a comparison, 179,000 Windows based machines are only providing 170 TFLOPs.

Directly harnessing the computing power of the PS3’s Cell processor, a professor at the University of Massachusetts is using 8 networked PS3s to provide the same equivalent computing power that he was renting from a supercomputer with 200 processors.

‘This generation gaming hardware’ is a bit vague to say the least, but David Braben of Frontier Development and one of the co-developers of the original ‘Elite’, a hugely successful space-trading game originally on the BBC Micro computer (and then many other 8 bit machines), has said that it is penciled in for a release.

It will be interesting to see how it translates to the current hardware and whether it still retains the compelling game play that the original had back in the 1980s. Elite is definitely up there as an all time gaming classic, having spent many many hours playing it on my 48k ZX Spectrum in the ’80s.

This is an interesting post – some basic tests opening large files with WinRAR showed it ran faster when running under Wine (a Windows API emulator) than on ‘real’ Windows. Now there’s a turn out for the books…

Oracle’s $6.7 billion offer to acquire BEA stands until this Sunday, at which point they’ll withdraw their offer. No other counter offers have come forward higher than Oracle’s bid so far, but Oracle says it does not want to go into a drawn out fight to acquire the company. Time will tell.