Interesting news from Sony has it that there will be many options for hard drives to be attached to the forthcoming Playstation 3 (PS3) and that those drives can run Linux (to enable people to consider the PS3 a “entertainment supercomputer”). It isn’t really a surprise that Linux will run on a PS3 because the Cell processor at it’s heart is an IBM chip and IBM is a big supporter of Linux and helps port it to all of their CPUs.
I guess this means that the default PS3 will be just a powerful games machine but with the addition of a add-on drive becomes a full multi use entertainment PC running Linux.
Apparently the reason the PS3 won’t have a hard disk by default is because no hard disk sold with the unit would be big enough in the long run. That makes sense really since the Xbox had a 10gig and the Xbox360 will apparently have a 20 gig drive, and yet the mainstream PC hard dives now are over 100gig. Any machine that can potentially be used to store video and other such tasks will fill a 10 or 20 gig hard drive very quickly.
There are some interesting factors to take into account here. PS3 will be a “connected” device, meaning that much of the entertainment value will be online. If it can run a full GUI OS like Linux then it will very likely have a web browser as well. Since the most popular Linux web browser is Firefox (by far), it may well boost Firefox’s overall market share depending on how many of the units are sold. The great thing is that if you are already coding to the W3C standards, you won’t need to do anything to take advantage of it.
