Who crunches numbers better? PC, Mac, PS3?

Number Munchers

Who crunches numbers better? PC, Mac, PS3?

PC running as a hackintosh, PS3 running a linux variant (unbuntu, or yellowdog?), and the mac running whatever the newest version is, because Steve Jobs told you these new features are needed.

=Seth-

So, I’m looking for the best workstation style flops/$ for parallel computing. Any suggestions? 8 cores good, 16 better. I was thinking of going with a Mac Pro for $2800. 8×2.8 GHz Harpertown cores & 2 GB ECC RAM. Student discount takes off another 10-20%.

=Detnap-

Hello Mr Seth,Have you thought about getting a ps3 for your project? The PS3 has about 200 gflop from the cpu PlayStation 3’s Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float, maybe 15 for double precision, while a 8 core is around 50 gflop.

=Seth-

Hey hey! Overall the PS3 would require too much rewriting for my resources, but I think it might work very well for a subset of my needs. Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind.Looking around I found this page:
http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/build-a-hackintosh-mac-for-under-800-321913.php

I could do without some things (smaller case, HD, & vid card) and improve on others (upgrade memory & quad core), and have my self a reasonable cluster node. Definitely not workstation class hardware, but it would work as a hackintosh for cheap.