There must be something “special” about the Cell BE, Mandelbrot fractals and Australians – I’ve found another implementation, and this one is really good (not to disparage jk’s implementation, especially when it was so useful). NotZed at cell.grondklont.nl is up to part 5 in a fantastic in-depth series on implementing a optimised Mandelbrot renderer on the Cell BE – of particular interest to me was the load balancing implemented using the atomic cache unit, which is quite impressive.
A number of #ps3dev residents have decided to put some work into a PS3-targeted Linux distro. Hanging out in #ouros (on freenode) some progress is being made on getting some basics together, with a rudimentary tarball for (aspiring) developers now available as well as a lot of effort on supporting infrastructure (bots, hosting, planning, etc). If you are at all interested, check out #ouros and/or #ps3dev on irc.freenode.net
From conversations in #ouros yesterday, it would seem that DirectFB is worth investigating as a PS3-Linux friendly way of providing a fast, light-weight graphical user interface for the PS3. First of all because X is a behemoth and largely undesirable on the limited-resource PS3, but also because DirectFB has a number of design characteristics that seem to make it a good match to Linux on the PS3 – it needs only access to the framebuffer (it already works), and it allows creation of device driver for specific hardware. It seems likely that DirectFB rendering can be accelerated without much hassle by using the SPEs. As well as this, SDL supports DirectFB (which means a large number of games and other programs should Just Work) and there appears to be current QT support as well. All up, this seems quite promising.
Otherwise, I’ve spent time this evening playing the Uncharted 2 beta. Apart from the eons spent waiting to join a game, it was quite enjoyable, if occasionally buggy and clumsy.