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My latest infatuation is a Sony PlayStation 3! Not for my love of gaming, but for its awesome computing power! It features a 3.5 GHz processor called ‘Cell Broadband Engine‘ based on Power architecture comprising of a PPE or Power Processing Element controlling 8 SPE or Synergistic Processing elements . In layman terms, it is almost as saying as if a processor has 9 cores and can excute 9 threads independantly.

If that doesn’t give you an idea, take this: IBM’s latest supercomputer, called the IBM RoadRunner is a hybrid of Cell Broadband processors and general purpose CISC Opteron processor and it currently ranks #1 in list of Top 500 supercomputers and is also the worlds first super computer to run at pentaFLOPS speeds!

It also features a 550 MHz Nvidia ‘Reality Synthesizer‘ for stunning graphics. As if that was not enough, the controller is motion sensitive (six axis) and supports vibration feedback (DualShock3). Apart from that heavy duty number crunching, a PS3 has got an inbuilt browser (java/flash enabled), built in Wi-Fi, an ethernet port, supports Blue Ray playback and can output 7.1 channel Dolby Digital sourround sound. Do you want more? You can even load your custom (anything that supports Power architecture) Operating system (home brews, as they are called) on it!

Such a computing beast, obviously deserves my attention

So here is a page where I’ll listing not only gaming but also programming and hacking resources for a PS3.

To start with, here is a link to Yellow Dog Linux distribution that you can install on your PS3.

Stay tuned for more resources!