Posted on Monday, May 14 2007 @ 7:29 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
In an interview with Mercury News, Microsoft's VP of entertainment business Peter Moore told that the Xbox 360 may be able to beat the PS3 in folding@home. As The Inq
reports:
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.
