360 to fold? And be better at it then PS3?

[KasuCode]

If the 360 folds im sure it will help things out quite alot as there are alot more 360s out there. Tho I hope its got some sort of low power mode. I wouldnt want my box blowing up as I have a first gen 360 and have had no problems with it... Or do I now they they changed there warranty on 360's...:firedevil


IN AN INTERVIEW with the San Jose Mercury News Peter Moore, corporate VP of Microsoft's entertainment business unit admitted that Microsoft was somewhat caught out by Sony's PS3 Folding@Home client. He said even Bill Gates had a conversation about "applying philanthropic processing power to big problems".
But he souldn't resist a jab at Sony's endeavour. "I’m not quite sure yet whether we’re seeing real tangible results from the PlayStation 3 Folding@Home initiative," he suggested.

Microsoft knows all about the deficiencies of the sluggish in-order triple-core PowerPC that in the PS3. And surely it is aware that has that it has something far more powerful inside its own boxes.

The Geforce 7900 inside the PS3 is no match for Xenos in the Xbox. Even the Sony Cell would probably end beaten by 48 vec4+scalar units hidden inside Xbox's 360 graphics chip. Folding@Home is Stream Computing at its finest, and six/seven/eight SPE units can flourish in the CPU. But when compared to the GPU, the Xbox 360 GPU would probably run in circles around Cell CPU.

And then Microsoft's marketing machine might get interested in touting Folding@Home for the Xbox 360 console, since it would no longer be a race between a snail and a rabbit, as far as protein folding performance is concerned.

The next question would then be, could Brook get set up running on a Xbox 360 GPU with all the limitations that Microsoft environment is using? µ

L'INQ
San Jose Mercury News


http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39508

Original
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/05/peter_moore_interview_part_three_answers_to_reader s_questions.html

[JoKeRr]

As far as I know, the 'sluggish in-order triple-core PowerPC' is the CPU of xbox360.... (lee63)

[russ_3d]

whats all this xenos running rings around the GF talk? i thought they were fairly even?

[Subtestube]

whats all this xenos running rings around the GF talk? i thought they were fairly even?

Raw perf wise, they probably are, however the Xenos has a wider instruction set/list of capabilities than the 7900, and so would be far better suited to folding.

[DMx]

PS3 Cell processor > XBOX 360 CPU

[Banko]

Article is a bit biased, it is saying if you can make Xenos fold then it will out fold the PS3, however what if you make the 7900 equivalent card in the PS3 fold along side with the Cell?

Basically no way the 360 can win that one.

It's just fud.

[|MaguS|]

The entire article is written based off an interview with Peter Moore, no **** its going to be bias...

[evilchris]

The entire article is written based off an interview with Peter Moore, no **** its going to be bias...

biasED

[Bman212121]

Article is a bit biased, it is saying if you can make Xenos fold then it will out fold the PS3, however what if you make the 7900 equivalent card in the PS3 fold along side with the Cell?

Basically no way the 360 can win that one.

It's just fud.

+1 Even if they could use the Xenos to fold it probably wouldn't do much because of the lack of shaders in it. The folding team won't make a client for the 7900 series because they don't have the amount of shaders than the x1900's do. It takes a fullblown x1900xtx to be faster than the PS3's cell, and as far as I know that is the only thing that is faster than the cell at folding.

GPU and OS support
Which cards are supported?
We now support serveral classes of GPU boards, including X1600, X1800, and X1900 class GPU's from ATI. At the launch, we supported X1900 cards only. X1800 cards do not provide the performance seen in X1900's and so we strongly recommend X1900 class cards (although we now officially support X1800). X1900 and X1800 cards are actually quite different -- they have different processors (R520, R530 vs. the R580 [in the X1900 series]). The R580 makes a huge difference in performance -- its 48 pixel shaders are key, as we use pixel shaders for our computations. Also note that the card should have more than 256MB (i.e. at least 512MB) of RAM, otherwise the GPU client will put a huge load on the client machine (although we do note that the 256MB X1950Pro using PCIe does work reasonably well).

What about video cards with other (non-ATI) chipsets?
The R580 (in the X1900XT, etc.) performs particularly well for molecular dynamics, due to its 48 pixel shaders. Currently, other cards (such as those from nVidia and other ATI cards) do not perform well enough for our calculations as they have fewer pixel shaders. Also, nVidia cards in general have some technical limitations beyond the number of pixel shaders which makes them perform poorly in our calculations.


http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html

So unless the 360 is somehow packing a larger GPU than Ati's fastest graphics card, chances are quite slim for them. Also, I'm pretty sure I've also read that it isn't worth it to try to use the GPU in the PS3 because it would have the same issues as other NV cards.

[Subtestube]

So unless the 360 is somehow packing a larger GPU than Ati's fastest graphics card, chances are quite slim for them. Also, I'm pretty sure I've also read that it isn't worth it to try to use the GPU in the PS3 because it would have the same issues as other NV cards.

The 360 GPU isn't larger than the X1900XTX, however every one of its 48 shading units is general purpose, and as precursors to a genuine DX10 compatible architecture would (I would expect) be better suited to the kinds of thing done in folding than the R580. As the 360 has a shared memory architecture, I would envisage a case where if necessary, you could give almost all the 512MB of memory in the 360 to the GPU if it was folding, and nothing else was occurring.

Now note, I'm not saying that the Xenos + Xenon would be a better pair than the Cell + RSX (though I'm not convinced the RSX could fold at all, as you've stated), however I would expect the 360 GPU to at least approach X1900 performance in folding type tasks.

[Sazar]

Article is a bit biased, it is saying if you can make Xenos fold then it will out fold the PS3, however what if you make the 7900 equivalent card in the PS3 fold along side with the Cell?

Basically no way the 360 can win that one.

It's just fud.

Not quite.

The r5xx series cards, especially the r580's are better raw folders than ps3 processors. They are far better than the g7x cards, per Vijay Pande's statements. Have a read through some of the statements and tests conducted on the folding website. The 19xx series is the best suited, even teh 1800's can fold but far slower than the 19xx cards. The g7x and higher simply don't seem suited to folding.

I waited for a long time to see what the g8x cards were capable of but unfortunately, after initial promises, not a peep from nvidia :(

Now, if the processor and the graphics cards were tuned to work as a single device, or separately, the raw output should theoretically exceed that of the ps3.

[Mr_LoL]

biasED
Shut it bias tool :D

[ViN86]

biasED
QFT

this article is ridiculously biasED

[nemecb]

If I had any respect to lose for The Inquirer it would be gone. Sadly, I don't.:rolleyes: