...and please ignore the reply's below, as it will be something in the lines of:



"OMG, COPY! HAXX!"

"MS COPIED SONY"

"OH NOES"

...and crap like that.

The PS3's cell is no match for the 360's processor. Even MS themselves admit that...l

I have Folding@Home on my PS3 and it's very interesting. I can't wait to see the results in a years time. Now to the article, does the 360 have the power to fold proteins like the PS3? Maye but the process will surely take longer. The PS3 is the console of choice for this. Stanford University would have picked the 360 to do the folding because of the amount of units in the market but they didn't. That's probably enough said.

That is stupid! The plain jane 3core 3ghz cpu VS Cells 8core 3ghz cpu. YOur an idiot!!!!!!!!!! !!

the cell is the way of the future.... 360 is the past

Just when I thought that THIS thread would possibily devoid of silly ass fanboys, you guys just had to step-up. Take your bickering to a different thread, you guys. Honestly.

Just imagine the overheating issues on the 360 if left on days at a time. And the 360 could not match the PS3 in power. The PS3 has 2.18 tfps and Xbox 360 has 1.

i´m no fanboy... i have the 360... but if we just take the numbers....

PS3 does 346 Teraflops with just 15000 CPUs

it´s 1.609.770 CPUs Less and 195 Teraflops Diference from PCs running Windows !!!

i would like to see how 360 goes against that !!!

First, Stanford would have approach Microshaft by now, if they had thought it was worth it. 10 million console. Thats alot. But they haven't, because it's not worth it. They know which system better. They don't want to be responsible for melting the motherboards on millions of Xblows. They'll leave that up to Microshaft. How Xblows 270's have been clustered to form a supercomputer? None.



Playstation 3 - HMMMM Now this is how it's done.

http://www.physorg.com/news92674403.html



Second, I would love to see Xblows 270 run F@H program. It would melt the motherboard. It is such a POS console from a hardware standpoint. Made as cheaply as possible, to give max profits to Microshaft. I can't wait for the spring update to come out. Lets see how many systems get bricked by Microshaft, this time. How many of you, have had your system replace already? Quite a few I bet. And now the rumor is they are going to release an HDMI system. Hmmmmm oh yea, thats nice. And it won't work with your current Xblow 270 games I bet.

Do people not realize how much 1 TFLOPS is? In the context of this project, that is supercomputer status. X360 owners getting in on this would be a huge help to the project. I do not understand why people are being such punks about this. Yea, it's a great idea that came to PS3 first, but it would be a great idea to bring in more people with other machines. I shudder to think that there are people out there that are thinking to themselves, "Wow~ My PS3 is so great because I'm helping save lives, while those 360 owners can't do shiatt" or 360 owners that get jealous over this. Seriously, kids. Grow up.

The X360 has 2 TFLOPS, the PS3 has 2.7, so the PS2 would crush 360 a number crunching. But the 360 would be able to use its GPU since it was designed by MS themselves (altough this would be like 0.1 more TFLOPS)



The only problem is, the 360 would overheat, like mine did....

The Xbox 360 has a little thing called the Xenos GPU, which is half-a generation beyond the ATI Radeon X1K GPUs. F@H already has a client designed to run on an ATI Radeon X1900 GPU. I don't think it would be too hard to get it to run on the Xenos instead.



The Xenos would easily be 2 to 3 times faster than the Cell.

How about Nintendo Wii? I am sure it can also do the folding processing.

Plus, the 360 has an ATI graphics chip. There's already a client for ATI graphics cards that could be ported to the 360. My math shows that ATI GPUs get more work done than even the cell CPU in the PS3, so the 360 should actually be better for folding than the PS3.

Firstly cut the crap about wich is stronger. Folding should come to 360. I only own Sony Products (ps1, ps2, PSP & now ps3) at home and xbox series is strictly forbidden. However as told folding should be availble for 360.



The more power this 'co-op' folding has the faster it will go. Im pleased to see it for my ps3 but i would absolutely also see it for 360.



Now lets go cure something and hope to see 360 users soon there.



oh offtopic: You see all the machines wich is running Folding in (realtime?), wich is looking nice (UFO Enemy Unknown anyone?). You see this earth looking globe with every connected machine (i think all OS counts there) - ps3 version only?



Regards, WilliamBirkin

The combined ability for people to help no matter what CPU-GPU-360-PS3 is waht matters. Even if someone clustered a billion casio calculators together the point is the goal is distributed. I have seen some post that suggest that just because they think the 360 is on par with the desktop computer that "whats the point" ... the point is that the more systems crunching the better the OVERALL NET EFFECT IS.

FaH is about curing diseases. PS3 and XBOX 360 are both great machines. One just has better games, and the other is a blu-ray player that happens to play games. Regardless of who has more computing power, we are trying to find cures to diseases that we may be afflicted with when we get older. So please disarm those fanboy urges and focus on the task... getting more machines on the grid for a faster cure.



BUT

Just for the record... I would never buy a PS3(without controller vibration and a unified online service), I don't think the reward/cost ratio is high enough. I refuse to buy 360 until an HDD upgrade is provided and MS can fix the cooling problems. When I do get my wishes for these consoles, I'll be folding right along with you guys.

MS have too much to loose by implementing this, if it turns out that the PS3 can complete work units faster than an xbox then its seriously bad advertising for them. You will not see a version of folding@home until it can at least break even with the ps3 and I doubt that it will ever achieve that.



(I consider xbox to be the better gaming machine at this time).

"...it is only 4 cores, 3 cpu and 1 gpu whereas the ps3 has 8 and a gpu... "



Don't try to get technical about things you claerly don't understand.



There's a lot of misinformation here, not just you but others, on both sides.

"Stanford University would have picked the 360 to do the folding because of the amount of units in the market but they didn't. That's probably enough said."



There will be numerous reasons, and not just technical. Xenon offers about half the floating-point power of Cell, so it's certainly up to the task. Maybe they haven't approached MS, maybe they have but MS don't feel it's a suitable use for the 360. Who knows?



It would be interesting if it does make it to the 360 eventually, because we'll get a rough idea of how the two compare for floating-point power in a real world app.

Who cares which is better, the point is, nothing would be wrong if few million additional computers (xbox's) joined the program to fight cancer! Focus on the point!

I really don't think I like him...

I can't wait for the 360 version to come out, MS will have tailored it to make maximum use of every part of the 360, rather than letting the stanford kids do all the work (and thus make mistakes). Sony does alot of outsourcing these days, it wouldn't surprise me if Folding@Home was done by stanford and IBM, because Sony doesn't even know how to use there own processor.



If (and when!) F@H comes to the 360, I'm sure it'll run more smoothly (if not faster) than the ps3 version. It'll probably let you view your friends' foldings as well, the 360 is just that cool!

No, no, no. The XBOX 360 has 3 cores, each of them at 3.0 GHz. This does not divide out into 1 GHz each, nor does it multiply to 9 gigahertz total. It means that it can run three processing threads at 3.0 GHz of its architecture's power each.



Meanwhile, the Cell has 7 cores (yes, only 7 in the PS3, one is disabled), each running at a similar frequency. Hopefully by know you know that clock frequency doesn't mean *****, and that a Cell clocked at a tiny fraction of a Xenon would still destroy it due to its architecture designed for floating point calculations.



The thing is that the 360 contains an R500 GPU, which is currently being folded on by PCs. This contains a massive number of shader processors, 64 in the X1900XTX, each designed for floating point calculations. This completely trounces the PS3.



So please, STOP talking about stuff you don't know about.

With the amount of dying Xbox 360 due to possible overheating, this is the last damn program I want running on my machine....at least till the die shrink and newer xbox360's come out this summer. Those could handle it. But the cooling on our current 360's is not enough, hence why MS won't do it on current 360's. You are talking about 24/7 operation, not a two hour gaming spree. Talk about an alarming amount of RMA's to MS!

i must really be out of the loop. i cant believe im the first person to ask, but what exactly is this? apparently, if i run this on my computer, ill help cure alzheimers. okay, thats great, but exactly how?

"the 360 GPU can do F@H but cannot work together with 360 CPU"



Of course they can work together, what makes you think they can't? The GPU (Xenos) even has features like 'memexport' specifically designed for that task (look it up on the internet).



"but must limit the workload for just 3 cores and not maximize its capability due to power concerns."



What are you talking about? The 360 can handle anything thrown at it without breaking down as you suggest here (and earlier). Quit your fanboy mentality please and stick to just using the brain you obviously have. Yes there are early 360s which have problem due to heating (mostly an issue with the GDDR3 memory), but these are a tiny minority. Using such throw away fanboy remarks doesn't do you any favours.



Anyway, you ask me earlier if I understood the technology. Well I do, I work in the field, although I'll admit I'm not an expert in this area, but I do know enough.



I'll focus on the CPUs only first. You said earlier "xbox 360 cpu and gpu combined because it is only 4 cores, 3 cpu and 1 gpu whereas the ps3 has 8 and a gpu..."



If you knew the architecture of Cell and the PS3, you would realize that the floating-point power comes not from the PPE but from the SPEs, for which their are 7 in the PS3, and one of those is resevered for the OS, leaving 6 SPEs for applications and games.



So if we're talking about cores, it's six in the PS3 vs three in the 360. It has been known for a long time that Xenon offers about half the floating point power of Cell (even Sony showed this during their conference at E3 2005), so right now, it's reasonable to assume that the 360 will offer about half the performance of the PS3 for F@H if running on the CPUs alone.



However, ATI's GPUs can make a great impact as suggested. Look at the table above and you will see that the GPUs on average are offering twice as much computational power as a PS3!



This is demonstrated on the following table;



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:F%40H_FLOPS_per_client_1.1.svg



Sp it's clear that if they bring the project to the ATI based 360s, then significant performance can be expected, especially with the GPU.



Of course, until this happens, it's a rather moot point, however the evidence is there, especially of the performance they are getting from ATI GPUs.



http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-highperformance.html#GPU

You're retarded, as are half the people in this thread. The 360 has a POWERPC processor. By IBM. Not an intel. And the r500 is putting out a lot more power in F@H than a normal processor, and that's with it showing it on the screen. Maybe some of your guys's computers suck and you have old graphics cards, that doesn't mean the GPU is worse for folding. And just because the PS3 can handle 9 threads at 3.2GHz and the 360 can only handle 6 threads doesn't mean the 360 is worse. The 360 and PS3 were designed to process in different ways. I think the 360 would be about the same, or in the same ballpark, as the PS3

Dude, I've gone 48 hour sprees on my xbox and it didn't overheat or anything (it was standing upright in a cupboard type thing with only the front accessible). I will admit, I had a launch xbox 360, it died near the end of february 2007! The only thing wrong was the DVD drive stopped recognizing all my disks, I think it was an issue with the laser.



As stated before though, this would be an opt-in program, if you don't wanna run it, you don't have to.

computational IS NOT A WORD...QUIT MAKE 'N CRAP UP! YOU...*****

Doing so (porting Folding@home to the 360) may show just how much better the PS3 is at these types of floating point calculations. That alone may keep MS from joining the team. The PS3 is simply stronger at this particular type of maths. As a gamer however, I'll still take the 360 - for now.

"Folding@home doesnt even support Nvidia gpus. Only ATI cards."



PCs using just a CPU offer a fraction of the performance compared to the PS3. The best performance comes from the ATI GPUs (twice the performance of the PS3 in fact). The 360 has such a GPU for ATI, hence if F@H was brought to the 360, it may actually offer better performance than the PS3 (a moot point until that happpens of course).



"The 360s fake 3core couldnt handle the job of running at 100% all day."



Again, don't be stupid just for the sake of it. The 360 has THREE cores and that's it. How can they be fake? Did you even think before you wrote that?



And as for running all day, of course they can. A minority of early 360s have heating problems, we ALL know that, but the majority of 360s run for hours (even days) without any problems at all.



"I have both systems so I am not a fan boy. But I do know facts."



You are a fanboy by your actions and your words. Fake cores? Cannot run all day? Who are you kidding? If you wasn't acting like a fanboy, you wouldn't need to deny it.

I agree, FAH should be available on the 360. I don't care how slow it is, I just think that having an additional 5 million users out there would be great for the project. I really love how people toss around 10 million like that is the number of people that actually have a working xbox 360. It obviously doesn't account for the huge failures of the system... With how many exchanges people are admitting to, There are probably 5 million xbox 360 users out there.

Yall have WAY too much time on ya hands...go get a girl friend..better yet go read a book!

This thread is one of the most horrible I have ever read. Most of you have no clue what you are talking about. Luckily there is a few reasonable people here.



I hope the folding@home project gets ported to the Xbox360 too. There is only benefits from this.



I quote one of the people behind the project:

"We have specific plans ready to put into action once we reach certain CPU levels, up to 1M[illion] CPUs. Once we start to get close to 1M active CPUs, we will sit down and make plans for going beyond that. Our research is very computer limited."



Do the project a favour and install this on you computers, your family's computers, your friends computers, your PS3 etc.

And push MS to release a F@H client in their next FW upgrade.



O.J

the overheating problems are mostly idiot chinese workers who don't put the GPU film on correctly or don't sodder the GPU connection enough. That's why the towel trick works by softening the sodder to create a connection. The Xbox 360 wouldn't be used in the same way as the PS3 since it has 3 general processing cores it would use the new multicore version that they are working on right now. Just remember that the PS3 and GPU clients can't run all of the WUs only some of them. They just do it extreamly fast. So the 360 will be just as useful as the PS3 even if it doesn't happen to pump out as much as the PS3 per unit.

This is going to sound like I'm taking a shot at the 360 but it's a genuine statement. I had 3 360's die on me in a short time. It did get quite hot. I can't imagine running the 360 for 6 hours straight for F@H. I felt uncomfortable playing a game for more than 2 hours thinking it might overheat. I've had a ps3 for well over a year now with no problems running F@H for 6 hours and it barely gets warm so it's not like I was abusing the 360. I would never run F@H on the 360.