Using playstation 3 to render

[alex22]

@Borgleader
Yes but the Cell is not a CPU like the x86 we use normally either. It is somewhat similar to a GPU.

[CTZn]

What a pity

But the problem is that SPU's are not CPU's

There's some major problems:

- they don't have enough local memory to load/execute the [whatever] binary code, and the stack it needs.
- they don't have DMA access to main memory. (in order to randomly access a large memory area with textures/kdtree nodes/triangles etc...)

I do not know if the FPUs in the PS3's CPU are accurate enough to allow [whatever] to run properly. They are optimized for fast game play and multimedia applications and are not IEEE 754 compliant. The IEEE 754 floating point mathematics standard was designed so that accuracy took precedence over performance whenever possible. This led to slow and complicated FPU designs needed for compliance with the standards. Games and multimedia applications need speed, not accuracy. They also prefer that when an overflow (when the result is too large in magnitude to represent in the chosesn floating point format) or underflow (when the result is so small that the result would round to zero even though the true result is not zero) occur that the closest value is used instead of generating an interrupt to handle it to have the program decide on how to handle the situation.
The reason that the IEEE 754 standard results in slow but accurate FPUs is that the scientific, mathematics, and accounting communities obviously will reject a standard that trades off accuracy for speed. Some scientists need as much accuracy as possible to avoid getting their work rejected or to avoid bad results. Mathematicians do not want to publish papers only to get embarassed when the math is shown to be suspect. Honest accountants need good math (unlike the ones who worked for Enron, WorldCom, or Parmalat) because they do not want their work shot down.