Impressive GPU Numbers From Folding@Home

ludd1t3 writes, "The Folding@Home project has put forth some impressive performance numbers with the GPU client that's designed to work with the ATI X1900. According to the client statistics, there are 448 registered GPUs that produce 29 TFLOPS. Those 448 GPUs outperform the combined 25,050 CPUs registered by the Linux and Mac OS clients. Ouch! Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits? If so, does that mean that IBM was right all along with their AS/400, iSeries product which makes heavy use of ASICs?"

Comments

Re:Distributed amongst home users

[Enderandrew]

The folding team has done this, and it will be a free download for the PS3 version. The Cell processor runs the Folding application itself, and the graphical representation of the protein folding calculations will be handled by the GPU with a pretty display.

Re:Lopsided Alright..

[oringo]

You can look at the statistics many ways. Here's the GFLOP/CPU catagorized by OS:

1. GPU: 65.463
2. Linux: 1.219
3. Windows: 0.948
4. Mac: 0.511

Of course, GPU beating the hell out of CPU in such tests is no surprise. It's pretty much a massive parallel vector engine. I'm more interested in seeing how PS3 holds agains all other guys when it comes out. They have a folding client for PS3 already.

Move the vector processor on-board?

[Zygfryd]

So when are we going to see (x86/64) motherboards with a socket for a standard processor and a socket for a vector processor?
Couldn't we finally have graphics cards that only give output to the screen and separate vector processors with a standardized interface / instruction set?

Re: Are ASICs really that much better?

[doublebackslash]

Partially true. The GPUs of today now have some general purpose circuits, but they are far from optimized and the execution unit count is skewed to the point that these processors would never, ever be able to run, say, an OS with anything approaching efficiency. FAH benefits from the insane amount of Floating point power because FAH is nothing but a pure FP stress test. They had to heavily modify the code to run on these babies, basically tuning the problems into vector information and letting the GPU do its thing, throwing. Only a few areas involve a need for CPU style processor, which is functionality provided only on these new cards. So please, please realize that even though these cards do not a contain a "protein folding circuit", they did modify the program to run on what it does have: 4x4 matrix operation units for multiplication and addiction.