• ms.lane@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    That’s a bit different IIRC, they purchased them directly from Sony and they didn’t have any of the OtherOS hardware lockouts like retail consoles did.

    • Coriza@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      At launch and for a good while PS3 came with a boot to Linux enabled by default, some universities around the globe bought some “from the shelf” to make some server farm and such.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.

        The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.

        IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.

      • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Retail units couldn’t access most of the RSX in OtherOS for Sony reasons, Geohot fixing that was why they killed OtherOS.

        Apparently the DOD units never had any lockouts on the GPU.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I’m not entirely sure on the difference here, valve is selling them directly and by all the reporting we’ve seen, there aren’t going to be hardware restrictions on any of the models.