“It’s a very souped-up Playstation 3,” or at least that’s what David Turek, vice president of IBM’s supercomputing programs, said about his company’s newest baby, The Roadrunner. “We took the basic chip design [of a PS3] and advanced its capability,” said Turek, speaking about the computer’s use of a modified version of the PS3’s lauded “Cell” microprocessor.

Roadrunner is effectively twice as fast as IBM’s last record breaker, the Blue Gene.

Sadly, the Roadrunner won’t ever be used for the noble pursuit of gaming; instead, Roadrunner will be relegated to mundane tasks such as simulating nuclear explosions and mimicking the human brain. Yawn.

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I’ve often heard the argument that people pirate games not for the game itself, but as a demo, to help determine if they want to shell out their hard-earned cash or hard-begged allowance on a new title. PC developer Crytek doesn’t care why people do it, they’re just not going to put up with it anymore. Though in Crysis’ case, this pirate reasoning makes perfect sense: who would want to purchase a game that they will likely not be able to run on their system, even if it has mostly top-of-the-line components?
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