folding@home Android/Arm Every little helps

[Lewis_W]

Getting Ready for folding month after seeing it announced on the wan show last Friday. Lots of old phones in the draw, so every little counts right? I wonder how long it will take to complete!

 

[Eigenvektor]

7 minutes ago, Lewis_W said:

Lots of old phones in the draw, so every little counts right?

Provided it manages to finish the workload before the deadline

[muziqaz]

I would recommend against folding on mobile phones. These devices are not suited for workloads like this. Ignoring all the propaganda, mobile ARM chips are relatively weak paired with even worse memory subsystem and storage. Folding produces a lot of heat, heat kills batteries, dieing battery is a fire hazard. We don't want your desk or chair or the whole house go in flames, do we?
We are actively trying to disable new projects for ARM on Linux, because anything below rPI 5 is too weak to fold, and it would be a miracle if any mobile chips finished any of WUs in time.

The only ARM chip which is worth considering folding is Apple stuff, that's because Apple decided to actually invest into CPU design instead of spending all their profits on creating meaningless slideshows for the pointless presentations (Qualcomm, I'm looking at you)

So to summarize, none of the phones would ever account for anything, except waste more time for researchers who would need to cater these super low power devices
P.S. right after covid, we actually had a client released for mobile phones, which was actually folding normal WUs on android. Suffice to say, it did not go very well. Even the smallest WUs would be overdue by a mile on (at the time) high end mobile phones.