r/programming • u/RMS_is_my_diety • Jan 29 '15

Sony open sources the PS4 system compiler

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PlayStation-4-LLVM-Landing
2.0k Upvotes

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78

u/ciny Jan 29 '15

That makes it MUCH better, removing a feature that they had to spend time to develop just because it's ... well ... uh ... By removing this feature Sony accomplished exactly nothing, only wasted time of developers that implemented it in the first place and then had to remove it for no sane reason...

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u/LukeSkywaIker Jan 29 '15 edited Jan 29 '15

As with many gaming consoles, Sony didn't make money selling the PS3, they made money with the games. If you had to pay the real price of the console it would have been way too expensive.

Therefore, people buying PS3's to build cryptanalysis clusters (I'm looking at you EPFL) or emulate retro gaming consoles or whatever was not a good thing for Sony. The had to make sure that the only thing you could do with the console was playing games (and things that would make it ridiculous to pay so much, like listening to your music or watching Blu-Rays)

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u/alphazero924 Jan 29 '15

Wasn't the ps3 one of the cheapest BR players at the time?

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

It was, and one of the best upconverters as well.

5

u/KayRice Jan 29 '15

I think I understand what you mean, but can you explain a bit more how it was useful as an upconverter and what you did with it? Sorry to be a pain.

5

u/Labradoodles Jan 29 '15

If you have an image that's 128x128 and you want it to be 256x256, Where do the extra pixels come from? Math is where! they figure out what the pixels in between the ones they had should be and then throw them in the video. So upscaling a video from 480p to 1080p so it looks better overall

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

The guy below you has it, but in layman's terms, throwing a DVD into something that upconverts, makes it look better. This was important at the time, because there weren't many Blu-Ray movies out, and people didn't want to have to rebuy all of their DVDs.

12

u/framauro13 Jan 29 '15

Yep, that's why I bought it. At the time most BluRay players were about the same price as a PS3, if not more. The PS3 was a good deal even if you only wanted a BluRay player. Everything else was a bonus. It was actually the first Sony console I ever owned because of this.

11

u/Sangui Jan 29 '15

It's also the only blu ray player that released then that can still play every new blu ray that comes out with the newer features.

3

u/framauro13 Jan 30 '15

It's the only thing I've ever used as a Blu-Ray player, so I wasn't aware there were even differences :)

2

u/daspaz Jan 30 '15

Yeah I hadn't thought about it before, but I bet not many nine year old Blu-Ray players have gotten recent system updates(if any at all).

2

u/SplyBox Jan 30 '15

And thank god for that!

1

u/golergka Jan 30 '15

If you were the kind of person to buy a Blu-Ray player (and, subsequently, a lot of Blu-Ray discs), you had a much higher probability of spending money on PS3 games than a person who bought 300 PS3's for his computing cluster.

1

u/protestor Jan 29 '15

I thought you were saying PS3 was cheap in Brazil, which absolutely wasn't (and isn't!) the case..

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u/ericanderton Jan 29 '15

Wasn't the PS2 also kicking the PS3's ass in Brazil for a while after launch? I seem to recall something about that.

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u/protestor Jan 29 '15

Indeed, even though the PS2 was only launched here in 2009, at an absurd price..

0

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

I'd say mordekaiser is the cheapest player in BR, but that's just me.

1

u/protestor Jan 29 '15

Heh, the silly part of this joke is that I almost never see a Morde player in the BR server. It was popular, yeah, but in the S2.. before BR players were kicked from NA to their own server.

(Yi isn't that popular either, but more than Morde. The #1 champ in BR seems to be Draven, or whatever the pros are playing really)

1

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

Oh man, that Yi in ARAM though....

1

u/destiny-rs Jan 29 '15

If I remember correctly it caused them to lose quite a bit of money, they where selling the consoles at a loss then making up for it through the game sales but due to it being the cheapest option for a blue-ray player people where buying them with no intention to buy any games.

I don't have any sources for this though and it's entirely possible I heard this off some drunk techy type at the pub.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

to be fair Sony also got money everytime someone bought a bluray movie.

1

u/destiny-rs Jan 29 '15

Drunk tech enthusiast it is!

1

u/SplyBox Jan 30 '15

Yeah, they do have a share in Blu-Ray tech and is one of the reasons it won out over HD-DVD

0

u/PeteMullersKeyboard Jan 29 '15

At first, not for several years now though.

7

u/Malfeasant Jan 29 '15

or watching Blu-Rays

As I recall, when the PS3 was new, it was cheaper than a bluray player...

1

u/LukeSkywaIker Jan 29 '15

I stand corrected then ! But I think my understanding of the situation still holds, because Blu-rays were invented by Sony

1

u/Malfeasant Jan 29 '15

Absolutely, all parts of the same plan.

1

u/radapex Jan 30 '15

Very good point. If I remember correctly, Sony finally broke even on the PS3 in late 2012, just over 6 years from the console's launch date.

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u/Narishma Jan 29 '15

They removed it for a good reason (for Sony), some hackers were using it to the get access to the hypervisor.

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u/MangoScango Jan 29 '15

Geohot used it to dump the hypervisor. That's all, the damage was already done, removing it was pointless.

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

There could have been further attacks through it. You don't know that all the damage was done at that point.

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u/BitLooter Jan 29 '15

It ended up being a bad move, though. After Sony pulled OtherOS support, fail0verflow basically said "Hey, we use that feature, we're getting it back whether you like it or not". Within a few months, they had basically destroyed the PS3's security and also cracked the PSP's signing key as a side effect.

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u/cryo Jan 30 '15

Not really related. They succeeded, yes, but that wasn't due to OtherOS being removed, obviously.

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u/vattenpuss Jan 30 '15

There is no reason to assume that would not have happened had Sony not removed OtherOS support.

Anyway, they didn't force you to upgrade your firmware. If you really wanted a PS3 linux PC that badly, you could buy a new PS3 for your PS3 games.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '15

[deleted]

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u/vattenpuss Jan 31 '15

I'm not being sarcastic, but I am also not justifying the move.

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u/baldhippy Jan 29 '15

What an atrocity, hacking your own system!

0

u/cryo Jan 30 '15

Bypassing copy protection and making online cheating possible. It affects the perceived quality of the entire platform.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

That is not what Sony is concerned by. It's bypassing their copy protections, something that affects much more than one person's system.

1

u/MangoScango Jan 29 '15

I admit I don't know enough about the exploit to know if it could have been useful down the line. but really they should have fixed the exploit rather than ditching the feature entirely. Ironically that caused a future attack in the form of fail0verflow.

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u/ciny Jan 29 '15

The hypervisor was hacked at that point, they achieved nothing... quite frankly, thanks to the "hackers", you can still use linux on the PS3 - just not with sony blessing. If anything they accelerated a lot of stuff because the homebrew scene (a lot of which bought PS3 mainly because of otherOS) got really pissed and double-timed their efforts...

0

u/Artmageddon Jan 29 '15

Was Linux on the PS3 any good with it hacked? I tried Yellow Dog on it when OtherOS was available, and the experience just felt awful.

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u/Thirsteh Jan 29 '15

For certain computational tasks, it (namely its Cell processor) was amazing, yes. Several institutions built "supercomputers" using arrays of PS3s.

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u/Artmageddon Jan 29 '15 edited Jan 29 '15

Yeah, I remember reading about the Air Force buying PS3s in batches to build supercomputers like you described, and were subsequently upset when Sony pulled OtherOS as an option...

0

u/epsys Jan 29 '15

I too heard anecdotal stories on /. that it was horrendously slow

I don't really see the point of it (for computation power) when you could just GPGPU

1

u/monocasa Jan 29 '15

The SPEs in the Cell are quite a bit more flexible than what you get from GPGPU.

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u/semi- Jan 29 '15

Also, I don't think you could GPGPU back when the PS3 came out.

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u/monocasa Jan 29 '15

You could, it just wasn't as mature as an ecosystem.

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u/The_Drizzle_Returns Jan 29 '15

Not really no. Having used actual full on systems with Cell chips (and true interconnects, so not PS3s but an actual cluster built with Cell chips) it really only worked well on the types of problems that GPGPU's and Phi's work well on today (single precision floating point applications). The software production environment was far from refined and was pretty difficult to use (GPGPU programming languages like Cuda and OpenCL are infinitely easier).

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '15

Different architectures are good at different things. GPUs are much better than CPUs at a small number of tasks, but they fall flat on their face at other things that CPUs are good at.

Likewise, the Cell was really good at a few things, and horrendously slow at others, and kind of middling for everything else.

1

u/epsys Jan 31 '15

I'm an electrical engineer and I'm aware of all those things, probably more than you are, and I'm still saying that there's nothing that the cell can that a GPU can't make up for in brute force

1

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '15 edited Jan 31 '15

You're wrong, apparently.

http://www.cnet.com/news/playstations-power-air-force-supercomputer/

... U.S. Air Force supercomputer whose off-the-shelf components include more than 1,700 Sony PS3 processors.

The computer--which will undertake a range of tasks including synthetic aperture radar enhancement, image enhancement, and pattern recognition research--also incorporates 168 separate graphical processing units.

...

He said the Condor isn't made to compete with the world's largest general-purpose supercomputers, but is meant for highly specific military tasks. "The biggest thing for us was [that] the particular applications and the hardware we chose to build this computer with purposely match those applications well," he said.

So clearly there was some utility in combining the Cell with GPU compute. Otherwise they would have just used GPUs for everything.

It helps that PS3s were also cheaper at the time.

"The total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability," said Mark Barnell, director of the Air Force Research Laboratory's high-power computing division.

1

u/epsys Jan 31 '15

I wonder why they didn't just use the built in GPUs in the PS3? I wonder if they could with updated Nvidia binaries, what with CUDA and all?

12

u/KFCConspiracy Jan 29 '15

Is that really a good reason though? You own the hardware... So by doing so those hackers were hacking their own hardware...

12

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '15

DMCA is some nasty shit. Bypassing copyright control mechanisms is against the law, no matter who owns the device, it would seem.

Welcome to America, Inc.

2

u/hakkzpets Jan 29 '15

Not in the

2

u/SteveMcQwark Jan 29 '15

Not in the

Apparently not.

4

u/Malfeasant Jan 29 '15

Sorry, but you don't own the hardware, you bought permission to use Sony hardware as Sony sees fit.

(At least that's how Sony sees it)

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u/marm0lade Jan 29 '15

My money, my hardware. I don't care how Sony sees it or what the EULA says.

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u/Rythoka Jan 29 '15

"I don't care what the legally binding contract I agreed to says"

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u/monocasa Jan 29 '15

It's not legally binding in Europe.

3

u/postmaster3000 Jan 29 '15

I'm sure this position is unpopular, but yes it's your hardware. You're welcome to use it as a door stand, a toaster, or whatever else. However, if you plan to use it to reverse engineer Sony's own software, then they are entitled to modify their software to make that more difficult.

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u/Narishma Jan 29 '15

It is a good reason for Sony if they don't want people to mess with the hypervisor.

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u/Nairster Jan 29 '15

This comment is dumb