I don't understand why you would want to run Linux on the PS3 anyway, besides just for funzies. It lacks RAM, no access to GPU, and doesn't the cell processor also run slow, and only let you access one core? Sounds like a terrible computing experience to me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but each cell has all of the above components built in. They are all merged into 1 chip.
Sorry but you are wrong fohfoh.
The Cell microprocessor is actually 8 physical cores with 1 disabled.
To my understanding, 1 is used for general calculations while 6 are specialized cores for something or rather.
Putting the Cell CPU, RAM and GPU on one chip would make the PS3's price go up even further due to the immense cooling required and not provide much of a performance gain over upgrading the CPU or GPU.
edit: from wikipedia
"The PlayStation 3 uses the Sony, Toshiba, IBM-designed Cell microprocessor as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields. Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the console's operating system. Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD. The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX."
The Nvidia RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is another name for 7800GTX.
Sorry, but I think you are wrong too. Neither of us were totally right.
Although the GPU is not included, the other components are.
Each SPE is composed of a "Synergistic Processing Unit", SPU, and a "Memory Flow Controller", MFC (DMA, MMU, and bus interface).[35] An SPE is a RISC processor with 128-bit SIMD organization[31][36][37] for single and double precision instructions. With the current generation of the Cell, each SPE contains a 256 KiB embedded SRAM for instruction and data, called "Local Storage" (not to be mistaken for "Local Memory" in Sony's documents that refer to the VRAM) which is visible to the PPE and can be addressed directly by software. Each SPE can support up to 4 GiB of local store memory. The local store does not operate like a conventional CPU cache since it is neither transparent to software nor does it contain hardware structures that predict which data to load. The SPEs contain a 128-bit, 128-entry register file and measures 14.5 mm2 on a 90 nm process. An SPE can operate on sixteen 8-bit integers, eight 16-bit integers, four 32-bit integers, or four single-precision floating-point numbers in a single clock cycle, as well as a memory operation. Note that the SPU cannot directly access system memory; the 64-bit virtual memory addresses formed by the SPU must be passed from the SPU to the SPE memory flow controller (MFC) to set up a DMA operation within the system address space.
For the record, I'm referring to the ram.
