Folding Forum

I recently read an article on the new Movidius Fathom USB stick.
Looking at the information given, it seems to be able to process 150 gigaflops on 1.2W.
I was wondering if anyone had tried using a VPU for folding or if it is even possible?
Regards
Canities

Hello Canities, welcome to the Folding Support Forum.

While powerful new exotic chips are always being released to market, the Folding@home code is highly optimized to run on x86 CPUs with SIMD processing (SSE, SSE2, SSE4, etc.) and on GPUs with OpenCL.

The effort to port the fah code to run on new hardware chips is always significant. And unless this hardware becomes commonplace in the @home (average consumer) audience, the cost remains higher than the benefit.

Here is some history detailing other attempts and a few successes to use high end hardware in the FAH High Performance FAQ.

It is not based on a x86 CPU nor Nvidia or AMD video cards, so not it won't run F@H until someone writes a new client.

Sony recently wrote a new client for Android devices, (some here have not forgiven them) so if a company with equally deep pockets and experience decided to, it may happen in the future.

As I read the ads on google, it sounds like a pattern recognition chip not a general purpose floating point powerhouse. F@H stresses floating point math, not integers, so if this is mostly an integer computer, it is not suited to F@H.