Back in late October, I wrote a piece where I took some 24 cards and did a test run using couple identical work units and saw that a $49.99 GeForce 9600 GSO (now known as the GeForce GT130 inside those new Mac Pros) is beating the living daylights out of ten times more expensive 4870X2. This brought a lot of attetion and the company started to address the issue. ATI’s poor performance in Folding@Home client was mostly due to different hardware capabilities of Radeon X1K, Hd2000, HD3000 and HD4000 series. But after couple of months of hard work on code optimization, ATI managed to crack
ANNOUNCEMENT: Winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008
And the winners of PALIT Folding Challenge 2008 are…
ATI and Folding working on F@H 1.2.1: Performance, stability updates
Catalyst 8.12 drivers are set to debut next week, and as you probably know, this is no ordinary update. AMD GPG is bringing its STREAM middleware platform and updated libraries to every user of their GPGPU-enabled products (R520 “Fudo” chip aka Radeon 1800 and newer). As a part of AMD STREAM, ATI will release its own video transcoder for free. Given the limitations and performance that Badaboom has, I wonder did ATI decided to do something more in “formats supported” area. 😉 On the Folding@Home front, there are great expectations from this upcoming driver, especially if you own Radeon 4800 series product. ATI worked hard
Sunday Wrap-up: Congratulations to the Top 500 Team
Waking up on Sunday morning is a good feeling (generally ;-). But waking up, taking a shower, having a nice light breakfast and checking statistics that confirm that your Folding@Home team reached Top 500 spot is priceless, as a known credit card commercial would tell. When I launched this F@H team, the goal was to reach Top 1000 by the end of 2008, and the goal for this blog was to reach 50,000 visitors by the end of very same calendar year. First goal was achieved with ease and the updated goal is reached even before December started – the goal for 2009 is to
Happy Thanksgiving!
After a day break due to mechanical issues over at KakaoStats.com, the PALIT Folding@Home 2008 stats are updated with latest data. The challenge will continue to receive updates on daily basis on every day of the week, unless Kakao goes on strike again. Personally, I feel a bit annihilated after today’s 2-hour visit to the dental office. My sins of the past (on racetracks 😉 finally caught up with me, and fixing them is no walk in the park. It’s 10PM here and I am shutting down – thanksgiving dinner is over and done for me, it was awesome seeing some old friends (Americans that
Folding@Home Challenge stats now updated daily…
…following requests from my readers, I am now updating rankings on Palit’s Folding@Home challenge on daily basis. I’ll do my best to update the stats everyday around midnight european time (CET). You can see who you need to outfold to win a signed GTX280 card by Jen-Hsun. As it stands right now, pole position is in the hands Francisc, of ex-editor of CHIP Magazine from Romania. Want to check your position or join in? Head over here…
Sunday Blurb: Slow week ahead. Or not…
After going through the planning for next week, there is a lot of things to do. First of all, I will be busy with selecting a provider for hosting the new site, but have no worries, plenty of more articles to come. 😉 But a lot of time will go on my articles – there are several big ones in the pipeline, just like the GDDR5 Analysis which surprised me with your visits. Usually, Saturday and Sunday are slow days, and my weekly lows always come on weekends. Not this time around, though. Over 3500 visitors came to the site to read the story, and
Nvidia to bring SLI support for Folding@Home
Friends from Bjorn3D got the opportunity to interview Michael Steele, General Manager of Nvidia’s Visual Consumer Solutions group. Short explanation of Michael’s role would be Nvidia’s head for all-not-gaming-related things. The interview was focusing on Bjorn3D’s noteworthy Folding@Home effort (the team is on track to crack into Top100), thus Michael gave some interesting thoughts, such as this one. There are a lot of very good guides out there that will walk users through the required steps to fold with multiple GPUs like the ones on HardOCP or overclockers.co.uk, just not in SLI mode yet. NVIDIA SLI is a great extension to parallel processing and we’re
Silver anniversary: big thanks to the first 25K
When I launched this blog several weeks ago, my goal was to reach 25,000 readers by the end of the year. I also wanted to see Folding@Home team 69864 entering Top 1000 and overall, not too loose too much time on writing this blog, so that the completely new site could take shape sooner than later. What happened is that today, five weeks into blog’s existence – the site was visited by 25,500 people, and shows stable growth. Folding@Home team exceeded all expectations and is now on track of ending the year firmly in Top 350, maybe even in Top 300. Anyway, there’s no stopping
Sunday Update: Folding@Home Challenge
Welcome to the first of our weekly updates in Folding@Home Challenge 2008. Several new members decided to join in, and here are the tables. Bear in mind that I am excluded from the challenge, thus my numbers are in your for reference. As you can see, Francisc from Romania is leading the race, followed by Boris Romac from Croatia. Third place is a virtual tie between Ivan Faj and Nikola Peruncic, both from Croatia. Good luck to all folders.
UPDATED: Folding@Home Challenge 2008
November 13, 2008 is the day I will remember for two things: Firstly, this blog clocked one month of existence and my F@H team passed the two million points mark. In the last 30 days, this site was visited 13,150 times (at the time of writing), and showing almost exponential growth. I’ve received a lot of your suggestions and thoughts – I will do my best to improve the site, but bear in mind that this site is a side project, while “the big thing” is taking shape (and taking almost all of my time). It will take some time to get it to life,
A big thank you: 6K visitors, Top 1000 F@H Team
The last hour of Friday, October 31st brought two milestones for this blog and myself personally: blog passed 6000 visitor mark, almost 800 came to visit the site today. I started this blog with a goal of reaching 5000 page impressions by the end of the month, and that goal has been surpassed by a cool thousand. My goal for November is to attract 10,000 visitors in a single month, so I hope the content will be good enough and that the goal will be reached. There are already several big stories in the pipeline for next week, so I hope I will be able
ASUS kills PATA and PCI standards!
Back on the INQ, I wrote about dangers lying ahead for AGEIA, Creative Labs and Bigfoot Networks, representatives of these respected companies just told me that their business model is solid and that they are indeed, future-proof. Well, that turned out nicely – AGEIA never took off because of $250 charge for a PCI card, Creative now exists almost solely on patent charges and selling off its own property, while Bigfoot networks made the greatest network card on the planet – and failed to pack it up in an attractive and future-proof package. The reason for this rant is a story on Xfastest.com, introducing ASUS
Nvidia’s $50 card destroys ATI’s $500 one or “Why ATI sucks in Folding?”
As you might already know, I am a bit enthusiastic when it comes to distributed computing. I’ve been looking for aliens through SETI@home, later with BOINC… but then, Folding@Home showed up and I became an enthusiast for this valuable project from Stanford University. My family had some share of dealings with Alzheimer’s (aka AD) and Parkinson’s diseases (aka PD) and I won’t go here into what psychological and ultimately financial stress that families around the world, including my own – have to endure. Folding@Home is also a project that pioneered the use of GPUs for distributed computing (if I am wrong on this one, feel
Folding@Home team update, new stats page ;)
I’ve been a fan of distributed computing since late 1990s, with SETI@Home running on every computer that I ever had. However, the real attractive proposition to me was running distributed computing applications on graphics cards. GPUs are much more efficient in stream computing than any CPU you could find, and I’ve tried DC apps on computers with DEC Alpha, Intel Pentium onwards, AMD K6-II onwards etc etc., but biggest jump in performance was Folding@Home on ATI Radeon X1800XTX graphics card. With the launch of this blog and the new website, I’ve decided to launch a new group, number 69864. Current name is the name of
