Folding Forum

divery4eyes wrote:sad to say, but I do not foresee AMD being with us much longer

We can but hope. Then maybe we can finally knock x86 on the head once and for all.

It wouldn't be worthwhile. PowerPC performance is appalling, and there are no compilers available that can vectorize code on VMX128 (Xenon FPU is a bit different to the standard PPC970 - Xenon is missing about 20 Altivec instructions, but has additional 128 registers).

So, if I'm following this correctly, you are asking what CPU will be sufficient to saturate whatever number of GPUs you are planning to have. If that's the case, then I can confirm that my own experience indicates that it takes approximately 15-20% (depending on the WU) of a 2.6GHz+ Core2/Phenom cla...

You'll need to define your goals more precisely. Are you looking for maximum PPD/$ in terms of initial investment? Or PPD/W (ongoing electricity costs)? There are threads elsewhere on this forum for PPD/$ and PPD/W figures for most commonly available hardware. (Somebody also threatened to start PPD/...

The problem is that nVidia and ATI architectures are fundamentally different. nVidia is MIMD, ATI is SIMD. In a nutshell: MIMD: Pros: Easier to write a decently optimizing compiler. Less dependent on programmer competence. Cons: Requires more silicon to implement thus more expensive, worse performan...

The problem is that the bottleneck of the problem shifts away from the simulation and toward understanding. In other words, the scientists become the bottleneck because data takes time to fully understand. And once that understanding is achieved, there is still the issue of synthesizing chemical com...

I rather suspect the best PPD/$ and PPD/W figure would likely go to one of these:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... .cfm?typ=H (£115+VAT in UK)
coupled with something like a good old 9800GX2. This mobo has a PCIe x8 slot, so it would probably work reasonably well.

Another thing worth pointing out that SSE2 capable units will still run on SSE1-only hardware, they'll just run slower. The core auto-detects what can be used and uses whatever is available. Any floating point features that are missing from the hardware being used get executed using the 387 FPU call...

The two are unrelated. It doesn't matter whether double or single precision numbers are used - that part is WU/core specific. There is no issue of efficiency here. Doubles are only used where they are needed - it is not about efficiency, it's about necessity. The other point about utilization is deb...

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, cheechi. SMP and SSE/SSE2 are totally orthogonal in the logical sense.

So would this be more efficient use of a dual core CPU than a wu using SSE? Or compared to a quad core running the SSE2 wu? Typically, if your algorithm is well adjusted to the CPU, SSE1 will give you approximately 4x speed-up on floats. SSE2 will give you a 2x speed-up on doubles. Multiple cores s...

- GroSMP is a bit different : it doesn't stresses CPU as hard as regular Gromacs because processing power is limited by data transfers between CPU cores This affects quad Core2s particularly badly, among other things that the two sets of two cores are completely separate without shared chaches betw...

For me, optimum is 75C. I can do 75c massively shader OC'd and mem and core stock Wow! All I can say is wow . I cannot even begin to come up with words to respond with to that. So you are expressing vehement concern about temperatures and yet you are admitting to "massively" (your words, ...

Pandegroup appears to address the issue of dumping by adding tracking based on ip and re-issuing the same workunit. On mine when ive had failed workunits its been a pain to get new workunits as it seems that after 3 tries your ip gets blacklisted for 5 mins or so. Sounds like you didn't clean up pr...

For example, which vehicle is more environmentally friendly to manufacture? A tiny little Prius or a giant Hummer? Sounds like an easy question doesn't it. Guess what, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely due to the environmental cost of the 30 poun...