Michael Dolan Dot Com

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

PS3 Cell BE Processors Computing up a Storm at Folding@Home

From James, found a new link to data on Folding@Home stats. 30K Cell BE CPUs in Sony PS3s WW running Folding@Home are currently cranking out 482 TFLOPS – compare that to 161,000 Windows PCs (5x the # of PS3s) cranking away to produce merely 154 TFLOPS (3x LESS than the few # of PS3s).

So with this data in mind, think of what you would use for your next compute cluster: a group of Windows PCs or a cluster of PS3s running Linux….? Based on the stats, 1 Cell BE CPU is cranking out 0.016 TFLOPS. 1 Windows PC processor is currently cranking out 0.00095 TFLOPS.

That means Folding@Home would need 506,000 Windows PCs to do the work of roughly 30K Sony PS3s. Think of the power, heat, space savings from that! That’s roughly 16 Windows PCs to accomplish the same amount of work as 1 PS3. Even at $500 per Windows PC, that’s a substantial cluster hardware savings as well…
Certainly benchmarkers would point out many flaws in this rough analysis. This sort of compare doesn’t provide a purely equal comparison as it also depends on what workloads are running on the PS3s or Windows PCs that are cranking out data. There are certainly also chances that some of the Windows PCs are more powerful and others bringing down the averages and making a Windows PC vs PS3 comparison less fair. However, it’s interesting to note the trends ;-)

And all those research students now have a reason to buy new PS3s for the labs!