PS3 as a personal computer - why not?

[Tiago]

I read so many nice things about PS3, that has a great power, and it would be able to run a lot of aplicattions with a good performance.

So, for games it's a great machine, but, could it be personal computer? Why not?
For what i saw, there people that runs Linux on it and even XP, and they say it has a good performance.
So why Sony does not invest a bit more in this machine and try to bring an OS suport? with the price and the capacity for games/multimedia and also power to run a OS like linux, why Sony don't do more advertisament to productivity? I am sure it
could run softwares like office tools, FTPs, image editores, i think it could run a bit of everything. With that price you could have a excellent game platform+multimedia player+personal computer.... everyone that has a PS3 has a TV... so you only need a keyboard and a mouse ....

am i missing something? or the power for an good OS is not enough?

[Teho]

I've been trying out Linux on the PS3 a bit. It definitely works fine, but a proper PC far outclasses it. There are a couple of stupid things that makes it slow and cumbersome, first off the OS does not use the hardware effectively, if at all. I know it does use several of the Cell cores, but don't know if it uses all of them. But it does not seem to be much acceleration from the graphics hardware going on. And the PS3 just does not have as much RAM available as is common in PCs. So yeah, it works fine for web-browsing and simple tasks, but forget about heavier stuff such as modern games and other resource consuming things.

You also have to install Linux on a separate partition, naturally. But then Linux cannot access the PS3 partition, and vice versa. So if you have stored a lot of music and video on the PS3 partition, you just can't get to it from Linux. I guess this is a safeguard to prevent modders getting to and altering the PS3's firmware or something, but still pretty annoying.

[Harrison]

The problem with any console is that is fixed hardware designed for the main purpose of running games, plus multimedia playback of music and films. The hardware, firmware and OS are all streamlined and designed specifically to get the most out of the hardware for these tasks.

I'm sure the PS3's hardware could be utilised very well with full support to work as a full computer system. The issue is that Sony don't have the funds, or the time required, to create drivers to allow full use of the PS3 graphics or its Cell CPU. That is why Linux doesn't use the full graphical power of the PS3 or all of its CPU features.