Why PS3 does not use its GPU also to fold?

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ckang008
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Why PS3 does not use its GPU also to fold?

Post by ckang008 » Thu Nov 20, 2008 11:04 pm

Why PS3 does not use its GPU also to fold? Is it too hard on the machine? Any comment from official source in regards to this?

thx

aristide1
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Post by aristide1 » Wed Nov 26, 2008 1:14 pm

Most likely for the same reason NVidia GPUs were not used until recently. Stanford has not written the code for this GPU, and you may want to check if they have any plans. I would suspect they decided to improve ATI and add NVidia because they would get better and more results.

Matija
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Post by Matija » Wed Nov 26, 2008 2:15 pm

It's more along the lines of the PS3 graphics subsystem being safely tucked away because Sony doesn't like people using the console for something useful. You can't access the GPU and make it do things in a normal fashion, there's a hypervisor which locks you away and only gives you a simple framebuffer.

tehfire
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Post by tehfire » Wed Nov 26, 2008 4:16 pm

It could also be that the folding program requires CUDA support, and the GPU inside the PS3 is based on the GeForce 7 architecture, which doesn't support CUDA.

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