I have a PS3 that hasn't been received the update to remove the "Other OS" option(and I'm damn glad I waited...). Does this also provide access to the PS3 Hypervisor? I remember reading, a long time ago, that that was one portion of the PS3 that was restricted from running Linux. On the same token, I wonder if that could mean better performance... I found that running Yellow Dog Linux on it was awfully slow.
> On the same token, I wonder if that could mean better performance... I found that running Yellow Dog Linux on it was awfully slow.
The hypervisor is minimal in terms of overhead. The biggest impact comes from the fact that the PPC core in the PS3 doesn't do out-of-order execution. You'd be downright amazed how huge a difference this makes.
No kidding? I remember someone from GDC in 2005(the one, I believe from Maxis, who created a storm on Gamasutra after bashing the Wii two years later) that putting out-of-order execution on gaming consoles was going to cripple their capabilities... but the PS3 certainly doesn't seem to suffer from it as far as games are concerned. I don't know enough about the topic at this point so I'd have to read some more.
The strength of the PS3 doesn't lie with the PS3 core, but rather with the ring of SPEs that the Cell processor has. These allow insanely efficient data processing, where the PPC chip really doesn't do a whole lot except for managing logic and state.
However, nothing under OtherOS used the SPEs really, and it had no access to the GPU, so the speed came down to the in-order PPC core.
The CPUs in all of the current systems (Wii, PS3, and the Xbox 360) use in-order execution cores.
My understanding is that for the prevalent workloads presented by most games, out-of-order execution's benefits don't outweigh its costs in chip complexity/size/power consumption/heat/etc.
