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Xbox 360 could beat PS3 in Folding@Home

May 10, 2007 in News comments 10

The only advantage that the PS3 is fully using is currently the Folding@Home feature, where users can keep their PS3's online to find cures to certain diseases and the more users will result in a faster pace of progress. But is this feature going to move on to Xbox 360 and dominate the PS3? According to Peter Moore, Folding is much more effective on the Xbox 360.

IN AN INTERVIEW with the San Jose Mercury News Peter Moore, corporate VP of Microsoft's entertainment business unit admitted that Microsoft was somewhat caught out by Sony's PS3 Folding@Home client. He said even Bill Gates had a conversation about "applying philanthropic processing power to big problems".

But he shouldn't resist a jab at Sony's endeavour. "I’m not quite sure yet whether we’re seeing real tangible results from the PlayStation 3 Folding@Home initiative," he suggested.

Microsoft knows all the deficiencies of IBM's sluggish in-order triple-core PowerPC that is built inside its own console, and does not want to get soundly beaten by IBM's Cell. However, it is unclear whether the Vole of Redmond is aware that it has something far more powerful inside its own boxes.

The Geforce 7900 inside the PS3 is no match for Xenos in the Xbox. Even the Sony Cell would probably end beaten by 48 vec4+scalar units hidden inside Xbox's 360 graphics chip. Folding@Home is Stream Computing at its finest, and six/seven/eight SPE units can flourish in the CPU. But when compared to the GPU, the Xbox 360 GPU would probably run in circles around Cell CPU.

And then Microsoft's marketing machine might get interested in touting Folding@Home for the Xbox 360 console, since it would no longer be a race between a snail and a rabbit, as far as protein folding performance is concerned.

The next question would then be, could Brook get set up running on a Xbox 360 GPU with all the limitations that Microsoft environment is using?
ITANI via theinquirer.net »
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  • -1
    Supernouva May 10, 07
    I submitted an article similar to this just a few minutes ago, and it is said that Folding@home for 360 is just a possibility. However, it could prove to be a big asset to Microsoft.
  • 0
    Sayyed May 10, 07
    How are we not seeing tangible results? The last months results from teraflops (what ever you call it) where mainly all from the ps3.
  • 0
    volacide May 10, 07
    The only PS3 advantage is folding at home? Uhhh, what?

    Also, this article was terribly written, he jumps around enough to the point of confusion.
    • 0
      ITANI May 11, 07
      The only feature that the PS3 is fully using currently is Folding@Home. The PS3 isn't taking full advantage of anything else. The PS3 is still not using the full power of Blu Ray as most games are between 6-12GB for now. Not many games as of yet use the motion detector feature on the Sixaxis controller. So you get my point now?
  • 1
    iLLmatic May 10, 07
    Lets say for the sake of argument that the article is correct about the two consoles' available power. What does the Xenon GPU have to do with the Cell CPU? Isn't the main focus of folding@home real time calculations? The program could essentially work without the on-screen visual(s), could it not? I'm pretty confident that the 360's GPU cannot compare to the Cell, not only in power, but simply because a GPU is a completely different component that a CPU. Is there something I'm missing here or is this just more trash?
    • -1
      volacide May 10, 07
      Yes, if programmed specifically, most GPU's are much faster than most CPU's.
  • 2
    Redemption May 10, 07
    The key here is that ATI developed the Xenon and it is a stream processor based system that has more parallelism than your typical CPU. The Folding@Home developers have so far done a lot of work on ATI platforms and ATI video cards are pretty much the defacto standard for GPU accelerated folding. This stuff is not made up, Stanford participates in programs and research on using GPU's for computing outside of graphics manipulation. It just so happens that folding (and game physics calculations) is one of those intensive functions where GPUs are many times more effective than CPUs. The folding power per watt on a GPU is many times more efficient than a CPU, so against a standard Intel or AMD this is highly believable. As for Xenon vs Cell.. its hard to say. I would guess that if the F@H developers did do something on the Xenon it could very well be more effective than the Cell processor.
  • -1
    Subtle Demise May 11, 07
    With this and the panned Blu-ray drives, Microsoft MIGHT be able to make a comeback in the console gaming world. If only they had a bigger selection of games...
  • 1
    Sayyed May 11, 07
    Too me this is just microsoft trying to up hand sony. I don't think they are doing it for the actual reason you fold, only to say they are better.
  • -1
    Final Blade May 12, 07
    Yea like i said b4 its a bunch of crap. And xbox should be concerning themselves on games. And rememeber lets say they did do it. Yea just the article supernova presented, this is what it reads
    "If we truly believe that we can in some way marshal the resources of a much larger installed base of Xbox 360 owners, with a processor that's of equal power to the PS3". Which means they need a much larger install base, which makes xbox cost more like 100 more.
    and with the blue ray possibility, add 200 more dollars and you get the grand total of 700 dollars. Yes do this MS so your system cannot sell a damn thing.

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