Folding Forum

Mainly because Microsoft doesn't want to work wiht Pande Group.

John Naylor wrote:The PS3 has a client because Sony have designed an adequate cooling system

Edit: that makes the PS3 feel like a twenty pound brick.....

I know cause I took mine out to blow the dust out today....I think I hurt my back......

The performance of the XBox360 utterly sucks. There are no development tools available that understand it's bastard-son-of-Altivec vector extensions, and without the vectorization it's performance is so poor that a 1.4GHz Pentium III blows it away by a factor of 5 (I kid you not). When you consider that Xenon is a 3.2GHz processor, that gets more than a little embarrasing. I hacked GCC to exclude the unimplemented opcodes from the Altivec module to get it working, and it produced correct object code, but then the linker went and put in some of the offending instructions. I believe there is a VMX128 (Xenon's derivation of Altivec) supporting version of bintools, so that'll probably fix the linker issue.

Unfortunately, at that point my XBox360 diead a death of 3 red LEDs, so I never finished the project - it seemed pointless considering it takes a lot of effort to crack the codes to flash the firmware back to one that can run Linux, especially when the performance without vectorization was so outrageously poor. GCC is the only compiler available that could have any kind of vectorization support on it, and GCC is pretty poor when it comes to performance of the machine code produced. IBM's XL/C doesn't have VMX128 support, and from what some of the XBox360 hackers told me, the official MS compiler for it doesn't seem to know how to vectorize either. So, there is little hope for any kind of reasonable performance out of it based on existing development tools without reaching heavily for hand-crafted assembly, and even then the performance would likely be poor.

All things considered - the XBox360 isn't really good for anything but gaming, and even that is largely down to the GPU.

the 360 cpu I thought would be a great folder, because to run game requer huge power.
some of the game I run now would never run on a PIII and so on.

I thought so, too, but as it turns out, the Xenon PPC970 is actually quite shockingly underpowered, at least when tested using the available compilers. There is no optimizing compiler for the VMX128 vector instruction set, so that may be skewing the perception, but even with it, it should be in the same ball park as the standard PPC970 - which gets annihilated by the Core2. There's a good reason why Apple switched to x86, for all the bad press it got.