Plaidophile

BinaryTree pointed me to this cute article from December, 2000, during the height of the Playstation 2 shortage: Iraq Scores Hordes of PS2s at US Gamers' Expense

If anyone from the Iraqi government is reading this, let me point out some problems with the approach. (Same goes for anyone from IGN.)

Rather than picking apart the horribly Urban Legend-ness of the wording, I'll just point out the various factual problems:

"Most Americans don't realize that each PlayStation unit contains a 32-bit CPU [i.e. the I/O processor] -- every bit as powerful as the processor found in most desktop and laptop computers," said one military intelligence officer. "Beyond that, the graphics capabilities of a PlayStation are staggering -- five times more powerful than that of a typical graphics workstation, and roughly 15 times more powerful than the graphics cards found in most PCs."

Okay, as many of you know, I have the PS2 Linux kit, which is basically a full dev kit for the PS2. So I at least have some idea of what I'm talking about, based on what playing around I've done with it.

The CPU is a 300MHz RISC CPU, essentially a low-cost MIPS clone. (It's actually made by Toshiba and Sony in a joint agreement, and uses a MIPS instruction set, R4k IIRC). Its performance really isn't all that good, however; I have a simple benchmark which I run on various CPUs to determine their "real" speed (for my purposes; it loads a 3D mesh and performs a bunch of complex vector operations on it, namely calculating something like 1000 random shadow volumes). Here are some of the results (times in seconds; lower is better):

CPU	Compiler	cube	sphere	spikey	wsmr
Athlon 1133	gcc-3.2	0.0015	1.07	0.98	4.62
G3/600	gcc-3.1-Apple	0.015	1.76	1.61	6.48
PS2gcc-2.95.2-Sony	0.174	15.18	13.94	54.34

As you can see, the Playstation 2's real CPU performance is quite pathetic, even lower than you'd expect from a 300MHz RISC CPU (which should theoretically perform about half as fast as the G3/600).

But even if the Iraqi government did get a bunch of PS2s, how are they going to run the code on them? In order to do that, they need a bootable runtime environment. Currently, the only way that exists is the Linux hobbyist dev kit. Although it probably still doesn't fall under the export restrictions, it's still $200 a pop for that. However, in order to boot Linux on a PS2, theoretically all you need is the broadband adaptor (for the harddrive connection; the BBA has some passthrough pins for the IDE controller), some way of making the Linux kit accept a regular IDE hard drive ("bless" it in the way that Sony does so that the Linux installer recognizes it as a Linux kit drive), an 8MB memory card, and a USB keyboard and/or mouse, and at least one copy of the Linux distribution (along with a CD copier; the Linux kit won't boot without the disc in the drive, even though it copies the bootloader onto the memory card when you install).

Okay, still not insurmountable. But then there's the claims of the graphics capabilities. Although I don't deny that the PS2's graphics capabilities are great, they certainly aren't a replacement for a graphics workstation:

• It can only do 3D at 640x480 fullscreen (at least, with the libraries included in the Linux kit); useless for graphics workstation use
• Its OpenGL implementation is both non-conforming (it doesn't follow correct zbuffer semantics; specifically, it requires the programmer to care about the low-level implementation, and the documentation gives the lame excuse that "the hardware stores it as 1/z, which is why you have to invert the Z test function," ignoring the fact that pretty much all hardware stores it as 1/z) and extremely incomplete (about all that it can do is draw shaded textured lines and polygons)
• Its low-level libraries require completely rewriting your code to use them
• In order to get any decent performance, you have to treat the PS2 as a cluster of distributed special-purpose processors (main CPU for I/O, "emotion engine" for vertex processing, etc.); it's a great design for games, but horrible for general-purpose computing

The intelligence sources added that with the upcoming hard drive (cited as being a 3.5 gig hard drive) and connections to the Internet, the likelihood of the PS2 reaching the ability to control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is very possible. Many military experts believe that Iraq has been in development with UAVs for several years to deliver chemical weapons, and that perhaps the PS2 is the missing link. Adding to the mayhem is that bundled PlayStation 2s can be used to calculate ballistic data for long-range missiles, or in the design of nuclear weapons.

The hard drive is 40GB; the hard drive which comes with the PS2linux kit is, as far as I can tell, the exact same unit which is going to be available on an off-the-shelf basis, judging by the packaging. The PS2 is definitely not suitable for controlling a UAV (the only communication it has with the outside is USB and Firewire; great for a desktop system, horrible for a rugged one). And come on, a 1970s HP calculator "can be used to calculate ballistic data for long-range missiles." It's just simple calculus.

"Applications for this system are potentially frightening," the intelligence source said. "One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV -- a pilotless aircraft."

Oh, come on. A Commodore 64 can provide enough computer power to control an unmanned aerial vehicle. We'd better shut down all the thrift shops!

(Incidentally, one of the original intents for the Commodore 64 was as a development platform for the ill-fated Commodore MAX gaming console.)

Basically, this article is a whole bunch of ill-informed scare tactics. If the Iraqi government wanted to get decent computation power, there's much cheaper and more effective (and usable) ways than the Playstation2. I mean, it's not like America is the only source of computers (granted, most CPUs are manufactured by American companies — though most of Intel's CPU manufacturing happens in Malaysia and Ireland — but most of the other parts come from Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and there's bound to be various countries which don't have a trade embargo with the US or Iraq which could be used as an import relay anyway. Like, say, Saudi Arabia.

Anyway, I just love how IGN reported everything that Worldnet Daily claims as fact, and makes it sound like they (IGN) have personally talked to "military intelligence sources." Bah.

I think that IGN was reporting this "news" in order to get American gamers riled up at Iraq for the lack of Playstation 2s at the time. Like, "We can't get Johnny a Playstation 2 for Christmas! Damn those Iraqis!"

Of course, a lot of the details (such as the size of the hard drive and the programming details and so on) could only be known in retrospect, after the Linux hobbyist kit was made available to the general public. So maybe the Iraqi government really did buy 4,000 PS2s, wasting a lot of money, and still have no way to put them to use. Good for them. :)