I can say for sure that frontier is a bunch of computers with all the typical components - just highly customized hardware. The whole point of a Beowulf cluster design was that you got away from circuit interconnects and relied on commodity hardware that any vendor could provide. Making the “personal” distinction based on what I pointed out shouldn’t be disqualifying factors and shouldn’t factor into this discussion. Even a bunch of early ps3s could do this, fitting the exact purpose of a Beowulf cluster design.

We might as well discount anything that has (U)EFI as well since bios can’t fully bootstrap a system and must rely on it to finish initialization. I just think this is shifting the goalposts to fit a personal narrative. I won’t be pedantic and pull articles defining what a personal computer is, but based on a lot of the literature out there says, a ps4 does seem fit the bill.

My original point was that the ps4 has a regular operating system that relies on “regular” components in order to operate, though I’d also point out that my ps3 example created a compute cluster as well.

If this is the case, then we can throw out many things that actually are computers as well, including anything that isn’t strictly a desktop matching very specific parameters - systems like Fugaku (arm with a hybrid os) or Frontier don’t count because of their slingshot network etc etc.

It just feels like a slippery slope to start discounting things like this.

It’s my understanding that the ps4 (and presumably the ps5) use bsd as a base operating system. BIOS or no, it’s a Unix system running on an x86_64 architecture.