folding on a console

[Tom_nerd]

hi guys

 

I was wondering why the folding at home software was not on ps4 or xbox one, I was wondering if there was a reason for this, because apparently people could do it on the PS3, if you can then please feel free to call me stupid.

 

thanks in advance, Tom

[SansVarnic]

The F@H team simply has not made or adapted the F@H software to be utilized on those consoles. It is unknown if it will be at this time.

[Tomatodude95]

Another reason might be that the systems are pretty locked down, so in order to get software working on the consoles would require them to get it verified by Sony and Microsoft, which might even require paying some licensing fee. On the PS3 this was possible because the software that came installed on the console allowed the installation of Linux as a secondary OS or a replacement, I don't quite remember the details. Therefore it was possible to run the Linux client software on them and use them in that way.

[QuintLeo]

When the PS3 first showed up, there was NO "GPU compute" at all.

The CPU in the PS3 was one of the most powerful in the world at the time - in a FAIRLY CHEAP game machine.

 

Today, a single low-end GPU would blow away ANY console - for reference, the graphic GPUs in the current PS or XBox models are very close in specs to old AMD A10 7860K/7890K APU except that one of them uses GDDR5 instead. That is about equal to the HD7750 in capability (same core count, same or slower RAM, a little higher clock rate).

By CURRENT GPU standards, that's not even an ENTRY level card - the GTX 1030 was comparably to a bit faster (Folding works somewhat better on NVidia as they handle complex calculations better due to how they are designed, presuming same core count and clock speed and ram speed) and anything current in a new GPU is quite a bit faster.

 

It's not comparable at all to the early PS3 days when they offered an insane amount of compute power for cheap.

 

BTW - the PS3 was NOT initially intended to run LINUX, folks had to hack into it to make that possible - then eventually Sony gave up and allowed it semi-officially.

 

[Mithras Pan]

16 hours ago, QuintLeo said:

BTW - the PS3 was NOT initially intended to run LINUX, folks had to hack into it to make that possible - then eventually Sony gave up and allowed it semi-officially.

Actually... it's a complicated story but your version is slightly incorrect.

https://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/

 

The first PS3s ran Linux and Sony even used it as a soft-sell and one of the early accessories was a 'PC Kit' with a keyboard and mouse... I want to say that there was also an included HDD and that for a while was the only way to get a larger than stock HDD...

 

When the PS3 was announced it was Linux and backwards-compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games that got my attention. I was off doing life at the time so never actually owned a 3... but my want disappeared as soon as they pulled support.

 

All that said- I respect the attempt on Sony's part to make a console with a toe in the PC world as opposed to PCs that play games and I expect that there is likely a good reason for why made them pull support... I wouldn't be surprised if there was a legal threat somewhere that put them at risk of having  a problem by not maintaining an official PS3 distro.

 

(Fun Fact: there was a US Air Force research initiative that built a cluster out of nearly 2,000 PS3s...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary )

[QuintLeo]

8 hours ago, Mithras Pan said:

 

(Fun Fact: there was a US Air Force research initiative that built a cluster out of nearly 2,000 PS3s...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary )

No shock - there were a TON of them for a while working in the Distributed.Net project.

MOSIX or Beowulf were widely popular around that timeframe.

[Knox902]

On 3/29/2020 at 11:50 AM, Tom_nerd said:

hi guys

 

I was wondering why the folding at home software was not on ps4 or xbox one, I was wondering if there was a reason for this, because apparently people could do it on the PS3, if you can then please feel free to call me stupid.

 

thanks in advance, Tom

Over 3.7k WU's completed and only 1.1million points. last 200k or so was on a GTX 1070 so like a day of folding because I just wanted to be over 1m. The PS3 was a very power hungry low performer.

[warmon6]

12 hours ago, Knox902 said:

Over 3.7k WU's completed and only 1.1million points. last 200k or so was on a GTX 1070 so like a day of folding because I just wanted to be over 1m. The PS3 was a very power hungry low performer.

 

Well we should define "power hungry low performer". Sure the PS3 is power hungry compared to modern hardware (for the performance) but I would argue that wasn't the case when F@H was using it in 2007.

 

Back then, it was very powerful and surprisingly quite power efficient for the performance it gave. Even compared to the ATI/AMD gpu's F@H was using back then (Nvidia GPU's couldn't fold till about a year after the PS3 client launched).

 

Around 900 to 1,000 PPD on PS3 vs a Radeon HD 3870 typical 1.5K PPD (max of 2k PPD if i remember correctly). It wasn't something to sneeze at.

 

 

 

Now if were  trying to compare point production of Hardware and Software of 2007 to our current stuff.... That's pretty much comparing apples to potatoes....

 

Different WU projects (with different base points), different Folding cores, new instruction-sets on new hardware, and most importantly, the use of "Quick Return Bonus" (QRB) that wasn't being using at all during that time, makes a comparison difficult, if not impossible. (QRB wasn't used till 2009/2010 on cpus and 2012/13 for gpu's).

 

Spoiler

For those that dont know, QRB is the bonus point system used to give extra points to WU's that are completed early. Faster you return them, the more points you get per WU.

 

https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=13160

Prior to QRB being used, your PPD was based on the "base points" of a WU and how many WU's you completed. So 3 WU's, 500 points each, completed each day was 1500 ppd for your system.