[Beowulf] Xbox xenon

[John Hearns]

I just caught an item on the BBC news about the new Xbox Xenon.

I thought I would be the one to start our regular strictly for
fun threads on 'let's build a cluster with games consoles'.

A quick Google found an old specification document.
Three cores on a 3.5Ghz PowerPC chip.
32K L1 cache on each, plus a shared 1M L2 cache.
The interesting comment though:
"The L2 cache also has the very unusual feature of being directly
readable from the GPU, which allows the GPU to consume geometry and
texture data from L2 and main memory simultaneously.
Xenon CPU instructions are exposed to games through compiler intrinsics,
allowing developers to access the power of the chip using C language
notation."
Some smart people should be able to use the GPU instructions in an
elegant fashion.



(ps. let's not dip these things in vegetable oil, as in another Slashdot
thread. Its enough to have discussions on the Beowulf list regarding
cooling, we don't need schemes on how to get rid of fish+chip shop
smells)