PS3 folding performance isn’t THAT great
March 27 Carl Nelson
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Since the launch of Folding@Home for Playstation 3, people have been awestruck in its apparent performance advantage over PCs that cost up to 2 or 3 times as much as a PS3, and consumes more power.
However, this article at Ars Technica explains that not everything is as it seems. They point out that the PS3 is doing somewhat specialized calculations that take advantage of the Cell processor’s capabilities, while the more robust CPU does more complicated calculations. The GPU client is even more specialized.
They go on to say that comparing the PS3’s folding performance to the PC is not even ‘apples to oranges’ but more like ‘apples to citrus’ because of the wide variety of processors being used in the “Windows” group.
That’s not to say the PS3 isn’t a wicked Folder; it’s just not as ridiculously fast as you might think just by looking at the numbers.
Filed under: Video Game Hardware
Tags: Distributed Computing, Playstation 3, Sony
Yeah, I could tell by the demonstration on gamespot that it was crunching quite slow.
Hopefully they’ll have updates to optimize performance and all that jazz.
I don’t think you understand ;)
With the 1.2 version of the client as well as the upcoming 1.3 version, more WU will be calculated.
Someone watches PS3’s fly by the folding charts and is left speechless, if I may say.
I have to remind you that the client is not THAT optimized. The theoretical performance for EACH SPE in the Cell processor is 25GFLOPS on single precision numbers.