Socket 940 FPGA

[Jason Ozolins]

I have an assortment of information on the Cell processor.
But whether it will be possible for ordinary folks to be
able to run a little code on the PS3, without being a game
company or otherwise privledged with access to development
systems, seems more difficult to determine.

With a stack of PS3's some algorithms become interesting.
And it appears that they will have to sell these for less
than the cost of the parts, let along manufacturing costs.

Which is why they try so hard to prevent you from running your own code
on it. Gillette wouldn't give away the razor if they thought you'd make
your own replacement blades, either.

What gets my goat is when Sony/Microsoft/Gillette represent that anyone
who subverts their business model is a criminal.

Buy a Playstation 2 and then put it in a cupboard without buying any
games? That's legal. Install a mod chip so that you can buy and play
imported games? You must be a pirate. Or, better still, you're somehow
funding terrorism.

 

[The little lost angel]

A GPU only makes sense if it's connected to the display unit. Since there
is already a channel for the GPU...

There is the Ageia PhysX(or PhsyX?) expansion card that's being spoken
of in some gaming boards that offloads physics calculations from the
CPU. Would something like this be viable in such a socketed
configuration since it doesn't have to push tons of graphics data,
just the points/vertices(?) and results, no?

I suppose gamers who would pay $500 for a high end graphics card
probably would pay say $200 more for an additional coproc?

 

[Del Cecchi]

Which is why they try so hard to prevent you from running your own code
on it. Gillette wouldn't give away the razor if they thought you'd make
your own replacement blades, either.

What gets my goat is when Sony/Microsoft/Gillette represent that anyone
who subverts their business model is a criminal.

Buy a Playstation 2 and then put it in a cupboard without buying any
games? That's legal. Install a mod chip so that you can buy and play
imported games? You must be a pirate. Or, better still, you're somehow
funding terrorism.

Isn't that same mod chip used to play burned copies of games? Copies
that might be illegal bootlegs? Sort of like possession of burglary
tools is illegal even if you aren't breaking into houses.

 

[The little lost angel]

Isn't that same mod chip used to play burned copies of games? Copies
that might be illegal bootlegs? Sort of like possession of burglary
tools is illegal even if you aren't breaking into houses.

Hmm, so why isn't ownership of guns in the States illegal since murder
is illegal, murder tools should be too. What about screw drivers,
knives and baseball bats? They can be used for burglary, battery and
murder as well.

IMHO, It is absurd and stupid to make something illegal just because
part of its range of usage is illegal. Especially if the main motive
is purely profit driven rather than out of actual public
safety/welfare considerations. Mod chips certainly don't fall into
that category.

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

IMHO, It is absurd and stupid to make something illegal just
because part of its range of usage is illegal. Especially if the
main motive is purely profit driven rather than out of actual
public safety/welfare considerations. Mod chips certainly don't
fall into that category.

AFAIK, the US Supreme Court agrees with you.
This is a very old legal argument around "burglar tools".
OTOH, the US DMCA tries to make some tools illegal.

"mod chips" fall out mostly because they are "derivative works"
that do not escape the original copyright.

-- Robert

 

[Jason Ozolins]

Isn't that same mod chip used to play burned copies of games? Copies
that might be illegal bootlegs? Sort of like possession of burglary
tools is illegal even if you aren't breaking into houses.

I believe the phrase "substantial noninfringing use" is usually trotted
out now. You probably own or have owned a VCR and used it to time shift
free-to-air television programs. You _could_ use it to record
television programs and view them many times over, even play them back
to a large group of people in a venue outside your home, neither of
which probably fall into the strict definition of fair use. You could
even use it to distribute dubbed copies of programs, or view illegally
obtained copies of recently released movies, or view content deemed to
be obscene in your particular community. But if you said that you
owned a VCR, I wouldn't lay in with the burglary tools analogies,
because that would be fairly judgemental of me to assume that your
particular uses were infringing ones.

Now, in Australia, there was until recently _no_ legal way for people to
use VCRs for time shifting - the legal definition of fair use was very
very narrow, basically covering academic works. Pretty much the only
legitimate use for the record function of a VCR or cassette deck was in
creating and dubbing homemade recordings. And yet, this was apparently
enough of a noninfringing use for the sale of VCRs, tape decks, and
blank media not to be a criminal offence.

-Jason

 

[Scott A Crosby]

Isn't that same mod chip used to play burned copies of games? Copies
that might be illegal bootlegs? Sort of like possession of burglary
tools is illegal even if you aren't breaking into houses.

Of course. Thats a designed feature.

Sony/Microsoft want to make sure that they get their tithe from game
producers --- for every product sold. They don't want what happened in
the Nintendo days, where a producer could reverse-engineer the design
and sell games without the tithe.

No different than a car manufacturer designing a car where the only
way to service it requires tools that can also be used to burglarize.
Pay the tithe, or no tools. Build your own tools, and get hit
criminally.

(If they care about home bootlegs, why on earth support standard media
formats?)

Scott

 

[Bernd Paysan]

Now, in Australia, there was until recently no legal way for people to
use VCRs for time shifting - the legal definition of fair use was very
very narrow, basically covering academic works. Pretty much the only
legitimate use for the record function of a VCR or cassette deck was in
creating and dubbing homemade recordings. And yet, this was apparently
enough of a noninfringing use for the sale of VCRs, tape decks, and
blank media not to be a criminal offence.

Are you sure? Normally, a lot of copyright stops at "private copies", at
least the part of it being "criminal". I.e. in Germany, there's no way to
legally circumvent DRM, but on the other hand, it's also no criminal
offense to do that privately. So you still can use Linux to watch your DVD
and copy "copy-protected CDs" for yourself without being a criminal.

So the VCR used for private timeshifting may still infringe copyright, but
it's not an offense. It's not fair use, either. It resolves the conflict
between the right holder and your privacy. If you, as right holder, don't
like what people do with your work in their living rooms, then don't send
it to their living rooms. This is well-protected space.

BTW: Recently, Phillips got a patent granted for blocking the remote during
commercials (also fast-forward). You know, zapping away from commercials is
theft. Fortunately, they don't intent to implement this "feature" ;-).

 

[Tony Hill]

There is the Ageia PhysX(or PhsyX?) expansion card that's being spoken
of in some gaming boards that offloads physics calculations from the
CPU. Would something like this be viable in such a socketed
configuration since it doesn't have to push tons of graphics data,
just the points/vertices(?) and results, no?

I suppose gamers who would pay $500 for a high end graphics card
probably would pay say $200 more for an additional coproc?

It's probably a lot easier and cheaper to make it a PCI-Express card.
A 1x PCI-e slot would probably provide this card with enough bandwidth
to the outside world to do it's calculations and then you could use
cheaper and faster local memory right on the card rather than worry
about system memory. Plus then you have the huge advantage of NOT
being limited to a platform that is only used by significantly less
than 1% of the computing population.

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

A GPU only makes sense if it's connected to the display unit.

No, not only. Programmable GPUs are also good in the area of
computations which require an extremely high amount of relatively
simple calculations. I know a man who was doing conjugated
gradients on a set of GPUs.

Anyway, I think that a GPU soldered into a board one can buy
as a "graphics card" will be a lot cheaper than the same GPU
in s940 just because the first one is mass-produced and thus
the whole idea of a GPU coprocessor doesn't make sense...

Best regards
Piotr Wyderski