PC GPUs will catch and and spank the PS3 in folding at home soon.

[NJ5]

MikeB said:
@ Kyros

I agree with your perspectives, but regarding flexibility the Cell can perform the tasks accomplished by x86 CPUs with extra care.

The Cell can outperform even top current x86 quad core CPUs at double precision (although this yields suboptimal performance from the Cell). For folding on the PS3 mainly 6 SPEs are being used.

Take a look at figure 6a (compare with quad-core Opteron and Clovertown processors, this document does not take into account the Cell's PPE):

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/research/papers/ipdps08.pdf

Figure 5f is also interesting, using additional SPEs performance gains remain near linear with the Cell unlike the other processors.

 

You keep repeating the same crap about that paper even though I disproved you last time you referenced it...

In that paper, they used TWO cell CPUs with 8 SPEs each. That's 16 SPEs vs PS3's usable 6.

They also conclude that each SPE provids 1 GFlop/s on double-precision arithmetic, which is very low. They even talk about "extremely weak double precision", section 5.5.

Now, I could realise all this after 5 minutes of skimming through the paper... I'll never understand why you, with your love for all things Cell, couldn't realize it.