Comment on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 reaches a new milestone: 75% of all PS3 games are now playable on PC

• tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s a small company that does mineral surveying, but we’ve done a lot of R&D in the past that ranged from designing our own survey instrumentation to writing geophysical modelling software. The Cell thing was for the latter.

  IIRC the Cell processor was built around an IBM PowerPC, but that wasn’t meant to do all the heavy lifting. Rather, it was supposed to be farmed out to these other processing nodes (I forget what they were called), almost like using a GPU for general computation. Now, the IBM consultant sold us on the Cell, saying they had an OpenCL library that would make all this much easier and hide the hardware details. LOL!

  First of all, it was a 32-bit library. Maybe fine for a 32-bit console like the PS3, but our blades had 16 GB of RAM and it wasn’t going to cut it. So I had to dig into the guts of the architecture to get anything usable and, long story short, a summer went by and I little to show for my efforts.

  Years later, we eventually got the program running on Threadrippers and that worked out much better!

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  • Aralakh@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Cool, thank you satisfying my curiosity. Wouldn’t have thought of mineral surveying crossed with tech, though not surprising eh, not something I come across personally I guess.

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    • Chaf@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Since we’re already drifting off topic - all big tech companies make a lot of money by selling hardware, compute, or some other service to the oil and gas industry, they just don’t go out bragging about it. Before the AI boom the oil and gas industry was among the biggest customers of the tech industry, just a quick search gives:

      www.amd.com/en/solutions/energy.html

      www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/…/oil-gas

      www.nvidia.com/en-us/…/oil-gas-operations/

      cloud.google.com/solutions/energy/oil-gas

      www.ibm.com/industries/oil-gas

      www.intel.co.uk/…/aramco-executive-brief.pdf

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      • tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, the prospecting industry includes mining and oil/gas. I’m in the former. In the past, if you went to a trade convention, the oil/gas side would take up at least 2/3 of the floor space, but that’s kind of flipping around now. The electrification of the economy is bringing metals to the fore.

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    • tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Well I’m in Canada, and almost everything is tied in with natural resources at some level. Lol

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah, I suspect most game developers felt the same way about it.

    Most PS3 ports were rubbish compared to the Xbox 360 versions, despite the PS3 theoretically being better hardware.

    Only the fancier PS3 exclusives really made the most of it.

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