Video Games Blog

Recently a colleague of mine mentioned that he was going to buy a PlayStation 3. When I asked the reason, he told me: "why not"? After all, PlayStation 3 is an extremely powerful computing machine and it can be successfully used not only for gaming. Ironically, so far, PlayStation has found the most effective usage in every computing task but gaming. I've tried to cover every such case demonstrating the impressive power of the PlayStation 3's Cell chip at work and let's look at them below.

First, it was Stanford University's Folding (at) Home program where over 600,000 PlayStation 3s have been connected to the program delivering a petaflop performance to the university's network.

Another person successfully using PlayStation 3 for scientific purposes was an astrophysicist Dr. Gaurav Khanna, who has assembled a computer consisting of 8 PlayStation 3s, run by Linux.

Jayram Moorkanikara, Jeff Furlong and Matt Johnson, along with two students from Dartmouth College, have hooked up three PlayStation 3s to reproduce human brain functions. Their solution was able to reproduce visual processing.

And now we have one more successful case of PlayStation 3's power. Security researcher Nick Breese used a PlayStation 3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours. Passwords like this are very common for securing Microsoft Office files, PDFs or ZIP archives.

PlayStation 3's Cell processor can perform computations 100 times faster than a powerful Intel chip. The very architecture of the Cell processor delivers this enormous computing power.

Well, all these is fine. But the main question still remains open. When will PlayStation 3 become a gaming machine in the first place?