[Tim Ellis]

Yes I am a bit mad.



Ok, so I'm attempting to run Maxwell on my PS3.


Status so far:-

Currently have Yellow Dog Linux for PS3, specifically optimised for the Cell PPC.
This is installed and running correctly.
I have downloaded and un'tar'ed the Maxwell Linux distro for glibc 2.4 (Current glibc ver for YDL on PS3).
I have set enviroment variables for PATH & MAXWELL_ROOT as stated in instalation instructions.
When executing the startmxcl or startmxst files, I recieve a message, Error in line 4 - unable to start binary file - This is the mxcl -d or mxst call.
Trying to run the mxst or mxcl from either a #bash prompt or via double click in GUI, yields no running program.


So next session is to strip out YDL and try with Fedora core 6.

Before I do that, is there anything I might have missed?

More results to follow.


Tim.

[Mihnea Balta]

Maxwell is compiled for x86 CPUs. You're trying to run it on a Cell CPU, which is a different architecture, with a different instruction set. It's like trying to run a Mac PPC binary on a PC, it can't work. The only way to get it to work on a PS3 is to compile it for the PS3. Anyway, even if you get it to compile, the rendering speed will be poor because the Cell without the SPEs has about 70% of the performance of a 3 Ghz Pentium 4.

[Tim Ellis]

Maxwell is compiled for x86 CPUs. You're trying to run it on a Cell CPU, which is a different architecture, with a different instruction set. It's like trying to run a Mac PPC binary on a PC, it can't work. The only way to get it to work on a PS3 is to compile it for the PS3. Anyway, even if you get it to compile, the rendering speed will be poor because the Cell without the SPEs has about 70% of the performance of a 3 Ghz Pentium 4.

Nice one Mihnea, thankyou for letting me know.

Is there not a current Maxwell port for PPC?

If I can compile a version on Yellow Dog for Cell, would that not utilise all the power of the cell and spe's?
Two CPU penguins and 6 SPE penguins appear during startup of linux and in theory the YDL version I have, is specific for the Cell & PS3.


Many thanks,

Tim.

<Insert flogging a dead horse image here>

[Mihnea Balta]

There's no Linux/PPC port of Maxwell, but even if one existed, it probably wouldn't work on the PS3. The main Cell CPU is based on the PowerPC, but it's not an exact copy.

You can't take advantage of the SPEs by simply compiling a program with the YDL/PS3 toolchain. The SPEs are not "normal" cores, so it's not like on a PC where you just spawn as many render threads as cores and go. You have to write code specifically for the SPEs (they don't even have the same instruction set as the main CPU) and handle their "oddities". The code needs to be optimized for the Cell, because it's very different from a desktop CPU. It's quite a bit of work to pull it off, and even then it won't outperform a current-day PC. Much of the 2 TFlops advertised for the PS3 are in the GPU, the Cell itself is not the monster number cruncher that it was supposed to be (it's also got way too little RAM to be really interesting). It's probably cheaper in terms of flops per dollar, but that's because console manufacturers often sell units at less than the production cost (especially when the console is young) because they get profits from content sales, not hardware sales. And let's not forget that Sony is trying to win the Bluray/HDDVD war with the PS3, which means a lot of money from content sales. And anyway, comparing flops doesn't always equate to comparing actual performance, otherwise we'd all be running everything on the GPU. :)

[Tim Ellis]

Ok fair enough.


Last question is with WINE and running Maxwell under that on Linux.

Still not possible for the same Cell reason you mentioned above?


Many thanks,

Tim.

[tom]

Yes, same problem.

As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor.

http://www.winehq.org/site/myths

and also,

Myth 10: "Wine is for Intel x86 only"
Well, it is true that Wine only runs on Intel's x86 processors. Unfortunately it will also require quite a lot of work before it runs on other processor architectures.

Is Wine working on PS3 there?

[Tim Ellis]

Have to compile WINE as I can't find a rpm for Yellow dog Cell. I got as far as downloading the compile packages I need, but haven't tried compling it yet.

Cheers,

Tim.