Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Client for Folding@Home Debuts, ATI GPU Version Soon
eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS."
Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.
Imagine what would happen if they could also harness Diebold's flops...
Donate free food here
Not as silly as if the $300 donated to cancer research was caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research to prevent cancer caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research caused by the $300 worth of coal that you burnt in order to pay for the $300 donated to cancer research.
:)
I HATE SILLY LOOPS
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Huh?
1) a video card does not contain a general purpose processor and is not capable of running an operating system. It contains a GPU, which is very fast for certain subsets of mathematical calculations, but that is all. It can't effectively branch, doesn't offer memory protection, etc. There are the biggest parts of a modern general-purpose CPU
2) Video cards are not tied to x86: A video card communicates with a bus like PCI or AGP. The system could be running an PowerPC chip, or a cell chip, or an x86 chip. nVidia has cards that run on all three of these environments.
3) You talk about the cell processor and the PS3, but that doesn't have anything to do with x86 being left behind. The cell processors are a massively parallel processor designed for running video games and computational problems. It will probably be inefficient (per watt and per cycle) to run a normal desktop OS on it. Not that it isn't possible, but that isn't what it is for.
4) You point out how x86 must be bad because Microsoft switched to PowerPC for the 360. So why did Apple switch to x86 from PowerPC, and suddenly everything is faster and lower power?