How the points changed in years

[Akaanc]

Hello,

I used to fold for years and left for a while. I had about 1000WU back then and totally about 200k points. First my pc and then my ps3 used to run 7/24 for a very long time but now I earn almost 2million points in a single day.

Is that because of the pointing system or the advancements in our calculations. I thought its strange to have that much points in a day while I got 200k points in years back then.

[JimboPalmer]

Especially in GPUs, the computing power today compared to a decade ago is phenomenal. There is a strong improvement in CPUs as well but Graphics cards have really advanced.

F@H uses a Quick Return Bonus, which disproportionately rewards fast computers. As an example, I have a GTX 1050ti and a GTX 1060 graphics card. The GTX 1060 is(almost) twice as fast, but gets 3 times the points, due to the QRB.

[bruce]

On the CPU side, points have increased (A) because typically more cores are available and (B) the Gromacs code has become more efficient. Then, too, the QRB is as JimdoPalmer has described above, giving an extra bonus for faster completion of the same work -- but nothing can compare 2/4/8/16 sse cores with GPUs that have thousands of shaders ... or more.

[Akaanc]

Then we can process much much more data in a very short time. Hope to see a major breakthrough soon..

[MeeLee]

When you look at Folding.extremeoverclocking.com, you'll notice several teams jumped in PPD with the introduction of the RTX cards in March.
PPD in some cases was 10x higher than prior, and the advances in hardware are far from over.
I expect to see a doubling to tripling of GPU performance in the next 5 to 7 years from current.

I sincerely hope that ARM/RISCV developers will chime in, as it looks like modern operating systems will focus on those technologies in the future.

In a way, the Points system is a bit unfair. A person folding for 10 years on a CPU since 2008, will have a lower score than a person folding for 1 year on a few graphics cards.

[bruce]

In a way, the Points system is a bit unfair. A person folding for 10 years on a CPU since 2008, will have a lower score than a person folding for 1 year on a few graphics cards.

True, but I think the choices you're suggesting are a bit unlikely. People who folded with a CPU since '08 are not folding with the same system they had 11 years ago. At some point GPUs were added to those systems. The people who are folding with a CPU today are either laptop owners or Mac-OS people -- and probably people who were not folding that long.

Sure, all these generalizations will have exceptions, but overall they're probably common enough to make your comparison unfair.

[JimboPalmer]

I started folding ten years ago (02/03/09) and do not regret any of it. Yes, my ratio of Point per WU is very low as I had a unit of Pentium 4 class computers folding for years.
I think my newest strongest i5 CPU can JUST do AVX on A7.
My first Graphics card was an ATI 2600 Pro, I went through several low end Nvidia cards and currently use a GTX 1050ti and a GTX 1060. (the laptop GT205 only had 16 cores!)


https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... =&u=429597

[Akaanc]

I got only 100k points with more than a thousand wus. But now I got about 10million points in a week. I’m happy to see how advanced our technology.

However I’m a little concerned about the particiption rate in the project at the moment. I’m running a single rtx 2080 with ryzen 3900 and my rank in the listings dropping too fast just in a week got in top 20k and increasing the rank very fast. So I guess there are not many powerfull pcs are contributing to the project. I dont understand why fah doesnt get media coverage :/

[MeeLee]

Pretty soon they won't have to.
The top contributors are contributing at well above household power levels (5000+ Watts systems). You'll notice the higher up the list, the slower the rise in rank. On a weekly base, you'll notice you'll rise about half the rank of the week before. That trend seems to continue until you're close to the top 300, when each passing of time, your rank increases are significantly slower.

If current contributors, as well as new contributors, upgrade their hardware in a similar fashion, there's a possibility that the organization will need people's computers to analyze the data that's come in, as the amount of data crunched today is ginormous; and will only increase over time!

[toTOW]

When I started folding, there was no such things like GPUs, there was only one core in CPUs, a WU could be worth 0.6 points, and there was no QRB ...