Comment on AMD and Sony’s PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
redshadowhero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoIt’s my understanding that the ps4 (and presumably the ps5) use bsd as a base operating system. BIOS or no, it’s a Unix system running on an x86_64 architecture.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sure, but the wii’s coprocessor’s os was also unix/bsd based and that was nowhere near pc hardware. Actually, a few embedded devices (cheap routers, cheap toys,… ) use bsd (while they should run linux hehe) and are nowhere near pc architecture :p.
What makes a pc a pc is the actual hardware layout, hardware connections internally and how it boots. Im looking deep into ps4 and i can see why people call it a pc, but its a huge misnomer. If a ps4 is a pc, a raspberry pi( or any random sbc ) is also a pc because it has a usb or sata controller, cpu and pci bus while it has no pch/fch, no pc bios (which i can accept to not be relevant) or any of the pc hardware you cant think off ( spoiler, its a lot more ).
Hell, pc’s dont even have a southbridge anymore. We have the pch which is directly connected to the cpu over a bus that is nowhere near the old northbridge/southbridge design…
redshadowhero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
If this is the case, then we can throw out many things that actually are computers as well, including anything that isn’t strictly a desktop matching very specific parameters - systems like Fugaku (arm with a hybrid os) or Frontier don’t count because of their slingshot network etc etc.
It just feels like a slippery slope to start discounting things like this.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fugaku is not a pc. Its a computer, but not a pc. Its a supercomputer :)
Its a slippery slope, yes, but its one that separates a personal computer from any other device that just happens to compute something.
I get the point though, what makes the arm ampere system a pc and the phone in your hand not? It both has a arm cpu :)
Same arguments count towards the playstation or other consoles
redshadowhero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I can say for sure that frontier is a bunch of computers with all the typical components - just highly customized hardware. The whole point of a Beowulf cluster design was that you got away from circuit interconnects and relied on commodity hardware that any vendor could provide. Making the “personal” distinction based on what I pointed out shouldn’t be disqualifying factors shouldn’t factor into this discussion. Even a bunch of early ps3s could do this, fitting the exact purpose of a Beowulf cluster design.
We might as well discount anything that has (U)EFI as well since bios can’t fully bootstrap a system and must rely on it to finish initialization. I just think this is shifting the goalposts to fit a personal narrative. I won’t be pedantic and pull articles defining what a personal computer is, but based on a lot of the literature out there says, a ps4 does seem fit the bill.
My original point was that the ps4 has a regular operating system that relies on “regular” components in order to operate, though I’d also point out that my ps3 example created a compute cluster as well.