The latest PS3 2.80 Update (optional) adds more than what you can find in the changelog. Naughty Dog’s Sam Thompson confirmed stated that more RAM memory was made available by the reduction of memory consumption from the consoles operating system.

The memory reduction mainly is important to game developers, when asked what improvements were made to the latest Uncharter 2 Multiplayer (Beta), he replied:

Naughty Dog is constantly working to improve every aspect of the gameplay; be it animation, lighting, sound, texture fidelity. You know if you look at the game itself with the 2.80 engine update, you know we’re adding more memory, so we get a lot more utilisation of the SPUs, so we increase our optimisation of the Cell processor as well.”

“So we’ve got from the engineering side all the way up to texture fidelity, artists adding in even more…I mean there’s really not a singular aspect that’s not been improved in the game,” Thompson added.

The PS3 memory was reduced to about 74mb at firmware 1.80, currently the new reduction amount is not known, but is getting closer to the Xbox 360′s 32mb.

MC from PS2Dev.org, has started a collaborative effort in creating a legal PS3SDK (Similar to the PS2SDK). He obviously needs your help, you can view his post and link to his thread below:

Well, we’ve all heard the rumors about ongoing PS3SDK development efforts,
but so far nobody has shown any code.

I think the main problem with getting a PS3SDK out the door is that
it’s a rather large project for one or two persons to undertake, so eventually
anyone who tries on his own will get stuck and/or fed up.

So what I’d like to do is invite to a collaborative effort, and the correct way to
do this is of course to present all the code I have so far, and allow people
to start expanding it.

What I have currently is a small multithreading kernel (supports use of both
HW threads), integration with newlib, and some simple GPU support.

There are plenty of work packages for interrested parties to get down with,
including (but not limited to)

* Interrupt handling
* A more sophisticated MMU driver
* Networking
* USB (the driver in mcload can’t be used as it contains GPL code)
* Storage drivers and filesystems
* SPE support
* VMX support (currently context switching does not preserve vector registers)

To get going, check out the following bzr repository:

http://mc.pp.se/bzr/ps3sdk

Note that you will need to rebuild newlib with the patch contained in
the “misc” directory (simply copy the patch over the old one in the ps3toolchain
distribution).

If you want to start working on something, please let me know, and preferably
publish the URL of your own bzr branch, so that others can follow your progress,
and so that I can merge things back to my main branch.

Let’s get hacking, people!

[VIA PS2Dev]