@ sieanr the 3850 says hi! $80 on New Egg.

He's not.

The Cell is much, much, much less limited than a GPU. It can infact do everything a desktop CPU can (like say, run Linux). GPU's don't even come close to that.

Besides - the real news in the whole Folding@Home stuff never was that GPU's would be faster (hint - they where already faster on day one) - it was how much faster the Cell code was than the non-Cell CPU code.

Yes as if any of you know wtf your talking about.

I can garunte 90% of you are pulling everything out of you a##.

lol all consoles hardware gets old after two years of launch, it has always happened and it always will no matter how hard they try

To sieanr: couldnt help but when i read this on your signature "Why do they call it the xbox 360? Because when you see it, you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away" who the fuck wrote that?? because whoever did it is an idiot because 360 degrees means he will be standing infront of it again xD sorry didnt resist too see that huge mistake

The cell is less limited than a GPU, but its more limited than a CPU. Thats why its faster than a desktop CPU in certain areas - its in-between a GPU and CPU. The things it can do well are the same things a GPU can do faster. 

Also, Folding at home is a dumb way to estimate speed since the assign different types of workloads to different processors. If you gave the Cell the same workloads as a general purpose CPU then it would do terrible.

"Which applications are best suited to Stream Computing?
Applications best suited to stream computing possess two fundamental characteristics:

A high degree of arithmetic computation per system memory fetch
Computational independence — arithmetic occurs on each processing unit without needing to be checked or verified by or with arithmetic occurring on any other processing unit.
Examples include:

Engineering — fluid dynamics
Mathematics — linear equations, matrix calculations
Simulations — Monte Carlo, molecular modeling, etc.
Financial — options pricing
Biological — protein structure calculations
Imaging — medical image processing"

What is stream computing?
Stream computing (or stream processing) refers to a class of compute problems, applications or tasks that can be broken down into parallel, identical operations and run simultaneously on a single processor device. These parallel data streams entering the processor device, computations taking place and the output from the device define stream computing.

Today, stream computing is primarily the realm of the graphics processor unit (GPU) where the parallel processes used to produce graphics imagery are used instead to perform arithmetic calculations.

Characteristics of stream computing:

• Enable new applications on new architectures
• Parallel problems other than graphics that map well on GPU architecture
• Transition from fixed function to programmable pipelines
• Various proof points in research and industry under the name GPGPU

How does stream computing differ from computation on the CPU?
Stream computing takes advantage of a SIMD methodology (single instruction, multiple data) whereas a CPU is a modified SISD methodology (single instruction, single data); modifications taking various parallelism techniques into account.

The benefit of stream computing stems from the highly parallel architecture of the GPU whereby tens to hundreds of parallel operations are performed with each clock cycle whereas the CPU can at best work only a small handful of parallel operations per clock cycle.

Link

yep pretty amazing

They updated the ATi client (and I'd assume the nVidia client) several months ago to include everything the CELL client handles plus some new stuff.

The only thing that makes the PS3 intersting for F@H is because of the volume and easy marketing.   When was the last time you saw a GPU based marketing scheme for F@H of equal size to the one plastered on the PS3?

If only you could pull up some CGPU / Larambee client figures!

As long as more people are Folding then it's good news.