Pentagon purchases 2,200 Sony PS3's
 

Military purchases 2,200 PS3s
Posted: 11:14 AM ET

It seems generous grandmothers aren't the only ones purchasing PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles this holiday season. The U.S. Dept. of Defense has announced plans to buy an additional 2,200 PS3s to complement a military supercomputer cluster running on 336 PS3 systems.

The military purchase was likely encouraged by Sony's recent PS3 price cut, which brought the price of a single console down to $299.

A military justification of review document explains the decision:

Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

According to Ars Technica, Sony sells the PS3 at a loss and hopes to make back the difference by selling games and accessories.

The reason that the PS3 is a more cost-effective way to buy Cell-powered GFLOPS than, say, the Cell blades that IBM actually makes specifically for supercomputing applications, is that the consoles come with a big, fat subsidy from Sony.

However, the military isn't likely to purchase any games for these PlayStations. The justification review states the systems will run a proprietary Linux-based operating system, which probably won't be able to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.


http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12...ses-2200-ps3s/

hahaha wtf.. good explanation though.

Cell processor is meant to last a whole decade!

lol reminds me of the rumor back in the day that iraq purchased a ton of ps2 for missile control system

on a related note:
:lol:haha:
http://gamerlimit.com/2009/11/ps2-fi...azil-only-465/

^ And this is exactly why governments shouldn't be stupid with tariffs. Keep in mind though that everyone who wanted a PS3 probably had their uncle ship one in years ago, or picked it up off eBay.

Kinda like iPhones in China. They had 'em there (talking the real deal here, not iClone) for sale, but not at the Apple store. ;)

damn i thought they were gonna train their troops with CODMW2

LOL :haha:

Nope they use this

HAHAHAA Awesome.

that makes sense to me

u can bet some of those units are going to pentagon members and their families

and someones gonna try and use one to play games with while he's on his break ;)

Giant LAN PARTY!

haha nice

awesome haha

damn man AA3 is pretty fun

they'll probably run MAG.

interesting they aint making money selling the consoles but focuses on selling games and accessories to make it back

bs, it's going out to iraq to keep the soldiers happy

oh shit i've heard bout AA for a long time now, i never knew it was a recruitment/free game!

I'm downloading it now from steam
http://store.steampowered.com/app/13140/

yeap, you are correct... 200 of them. Thats why they got 2200 ps3. :)

Mega lan party sponsored by US Government when MAG launch!!!

LOL wow

Sony just made a huge loss if there focus is to sell games

^

thought this generation company who sells consoles dont make as much as they did back in the days, hence why they have to focus somewhere else