Good lord, I'm not looking that far ahead! I'm just looking for the next 1000 points with which to stomp Freefaller & MetalGuru and get myself into daylight.2bullish said:Btw, expect to see me removed from your conquest list once the stats settle down dear boy.
How do I stop this deadline crap?
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I disagree with this as well. There's no point having clients that only a very few hardware platforms can run - not everyone is going to have Quad Core, certainly not for a year or two. They are very much enthusiast level right now.2bullish said:I disagree, the winsmp client is definately designed for quad and I cannot see them encouraging dual core machines to get onboard as it is the science that is driving this. They need the results very fast for the clients to be of value for their modelling, highend duals and quads will be the future for the science as speed is of the essence, reading the papers at f@h confirms this, I think even highend duals will slowly fade in the not to distant future (for the science that is) as quads and Octs take over. Its the speed which is at the cutting edge not the fodder for the single cores, although this will always be valuable. PS3 with its cells and the gpu clients will take over as they are complimentary to the science due to their architecture (again speed related) so I'm afraid we are going to have to get our check books out for the cause.
Also, the Cell and the GPU clients have a very limited subset of available science due to the very constrained nature of the hardware. While the PPE on the PS3 can do everything a PC's CPU can do, it's much the same tech as found in a PPC-based Mac, which, while fast, isn't exactly state of the art now. As such, the CPU is always going to have a part to play.
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Of course the CPUs will always have a part to play because there are so many of them, I ust disagree with your point about PPC Macs. The Cell, while similar in some regards to the Mac's PPC processors, is a different beast. The SPUs are programmable in such a way that they can accelerate FAH's production in a significant way. It is a whole different kettle of proverbial fish.Berserker said:
I was comparing the PPE alone, not the SPUs. The PPE is the part you'd need to be able to run all workunits on the PS3, and it's also the weakest link.
SPUs, like GPUs, have their computational limits - mostly down the the number and type of instructions you can load onto the SPU/GPU for execution, I believe.
SPUs, like GPUs, have their computational limits - mostly down the the number and type of instructions you can load onto the SPU/GPU for execution, I believe.
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Berserker said:
It's also down to the limits in types of calculations they can perform. They're designed for streaming calculations which currently means implicit solvent simulations only.