Folding Forum

Hi

I wonder how long will the v6 clients live. How long unto there will be no more WU for those client?

Likely quite a while. V6 and V7 clients use the same cores and are thereby interchangeable at the WU level. It will take a major change to the cores and/or the servers before there are no more WU's for v6. The basic goal of producing v7 was not to invalidate or move past v6 but rather to just make it easier to install, operate, and support folding for beginners.

No idea how long the V6 client will get work, but the PG still has work for the even older V5 client to be used on PPC Mac's and older versions of Windows such as Win2000. No idea how many older Windows machines are out there still since that is not broken out in the OS statistics, but there still are about 3000 PPC CPU's folding away even though the platform was deprecated a couple years ago. I have two myself.

Support for v6 will end "not soon."

Joe_H wrote:No idea how long the V6 client will get work, but the PG still has work for the even older V5 client to be used on PPC Mac's and older versions of Windows such as Win2000. No idea how many older Windows machines are out there still since that is not broken out in the OS statistics, but there still are about 3000 PPC CPU's folding away even though the platform was deprecated a couple years ago. I have two myself.

P5-133XL wrote:Likely quite a while. V6 and V7 clients use the same cores and are thereby interchangeable at the WU level. It will take a major change to the cores and/or the servers before there are no more WU's for v6. The basic goal of producing v7 was not to invalidate or move past v6 but rather to just make it easier to install, operate, and support folding for beginners.

These statements are mostly true, but not 100%.

If you're looking for a date at which there will be no more work at all, the answer "not soon" has been given and that's my impression, too. FAH does their best to continue to support old platforms for a long, long time.

In spite of that statement, whenever a new core is added (such as the GPU core for AMD) they plan to add it only to V7. While work done with older FahCores will continue to be available for a long, long time, an increasing number of projects will require a new FahCore which also means a new client. By limiting yourself to V6 (or earlier), you will be restricting your ability to be assigned projects that are most valuable to science. The transition is expected to be gradual (read "years") except if you happen to have a system (such as an AMD HD5000+) that requires one of the newer FahCores, in which case you'll be required to update to V7.