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GPU folding on E-cores

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 12:30 am
by arisu
If I'm right, E-cores mostly just lack some power-hungry SIMD features. All things that CPU folding needs, but what about GPU folding? All the core needs to do is poll the GPU in a busy loop and do occasional sanity checks. Would an E-core be able to keep up without starving the GPU?

I am thinking about having a few RTX 5080 GPUs and pinning the threads to the E-cores, and then reserving the P-cores for folding. Is this feasible or would an E-core not be able to keep up for some reason?

Re: GPU folding on E-cores

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 10:59 am
by muziqaz
You can use any CPU for GPU folding.
However Nvidia GPUs still get upset if any of the CPU cores are being used for CPU folding.
By upset, I mean lower performance.

Re: GPU folding on E-cores

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2025 6:03 am
by arisu
It's probably not too much work to get the Nvidia GPUs happy, at the expense of isolating a few cores from the scheduler entirely.

At least that works for a mobile Nvidia GPU I had access to and, unless my understanding of the kernel scheduler is totally wrong, should work for anything else, as long as it's not overheating and throttling the clock.