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Folding faster on PC's?

H

Huked on Fonick

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 16, 2002
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Why does my ibook take like 3-5 days to do a wu(800 mhz 32 meg vram, 640 ram), while this PC 800mhz Altalon 256 ram and some crappy video card only takes a day or less??? and the others pcs we have take even less time?

This looks bad for apple processors, a similar rate mhz pc is faster........hummm
 
it s not the processor who is weak it s the optimization of the code and the multiuser os unix.
There are just 20 times more windows users running folding than mac and linux users. that s why the code is not that optimized. for instance while a wu takes under a day anyhow which one on this machine in windows it takes 3-4 days on linux for the big ones.
mac is almost the same +10 % of the time due to the parrallel acting of the tacts in the cpu.
 
You also know that all WUs are not the same size... that's why they are worth different numbers of points depending on approximately how long it will take to do the work. And optimization also varies. The Gromacs-based WUs, for example, are optimized for the Mac G4/Altivec.
 
Originally posted by jimthorn
The Gromacs-based WUs, for example, are optimized for the Mac G4/Altivec.
Click to expand...

yeah, and my g3 machines are plugging away at them.... very..... slowly.....

my fastest worker is my g3/800 (cranks WUs faster than my dual g4/500). it can turn a 30-pointer (tinker, anyway) in under two days.

but guess what -- i just started folding on a pentium 4/2.4 GHz. it cranks out two 30-point WUs each day. it's just plain old faster. not 10%, more like 400%.
 
zimv20

That about describies it, some of my pentiums can do 2 maybe 3 wus in a day.................my ibook is lucky if i gets one done in a week (i do close it) or 3-5 days if i leave it on.........i think they need to optomise the gromac core alittle more becuase my pc is sure faster.......
 
Originally posted by zimv20
yeah, and my g3 machines are plugging away at them.... very..... slowly.....
Click to expand...

Yes, my poor iBook was chewing on a Gromacs WU for a long time. And my G4 iMac hasn't gotten one of them yet, even though it's my only computer that can take advantage of the optimization.

Originally posted by Huked on Fonick
That about describies it, some of my pentiums can do 2 maybe 3 wus in a day...
Click to expand...

Wow, that's some fast folding. I have one of the P3's at work folding for me, and it doesn't seem that fast. I'll have to find a P4 to try out.
 
I have decided not to fold on my macs anymore becuase its to slow, and every now and then it just randomly restarts, so i really dont get much done, but spend alot of time and proc power, as well as energy(leaveing them running rather than putting it in standby,

You would allmost think it was a goverment project......
 
Random restarting?

Government project?

What you talking about?

And why are all of you talking about the iBook, the iBook has a G3, no altevec and it runs sllooww on gromacs because that our code sucks big time.

Atleast compare a G4 to a P3... They came out at the same time.
 
Originally posted by MrMacman

And why are all of you talking about the iBook, the iBook has a G3, no altevec and it runs sllooww on gromacs because that our code sucks big time.
Click to expand...

because my g3/266 has been assigned a 33-point gromacs WU (max 15 days -- it's going to take 25+ days to complete), while my g4 is working on a tinker. silliness.
 
Originally posted by zimv20
because my g3/266 has been assigned a 33-point gromacs WU (max 15 days -- it's going to take 25+ days to complete), while my g4 is working on a tinker. silliness.
Click to expand...

Next time, DUMP THE UNIT!

we know it aint gonna be worth the time (you will get credit for the unit anyway) but really!

Delete the unit and get a new one.
 
Originally posted by MrMacman
Next time, DUMP THE UNIT!
Click to expand...

hmm... okay. how do i do that? (if it matters, i'm running the graphical version)

it's about 60% now, so i'll probably just let it finish. and i'm probably going to unplug that machine soon, anyway.
 
At the moment Macs are a lot slower than PCs at a lot of things, but expect the 1.8Ghz to be a lot faster than the 3Ghz P4 when it comes out. The Xbox uses Hyper Transport and only a 733Mhz P3 and is as fast as a 2Ghz P4 in games. So expect a hyper transport PPC970 to really speed folding up.
 
Xbox uses hypertransport?

zimv20, yes it does matter that your running the graphical version, in command line you can delete the unit, it would search for a unit and would download another one.
 
Originally posted by MrMacman
Xbox uses hypertransport?

zimv20, yes it does matter that your running the graphical version, in command line you can delete the unit, it would search for a unit and would download another one.
Click to expand...

Chipset: Enhanced NVIDIA nForce derivative. HyperTransport connects the North Bridge (GPU) with the South Bridge (MCP) providing a massive 800 MB/s of bandwidth. For more on the NVIDIA chipset, please see our nForce

Memory: Two channels of 64 MB of DDR SDRAM providing an eye-popping memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s (twice the bandwidth of the PS2). The PS2 has only 32 MB while the Game Cube has 43 MB.

http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/november/011116_Xbox/011116_Xbox.htm
 
Originally posted by zimv20
because my g3/266 has been assigned a 33-point gromacs WU (max 15 days -- it's going to take 25+ days to complete), while my g4 is working on a tinker. silliness.
Click to expand...

I've noticed this a lot lately. I regularly have Gromacs WUs that take over 4 hours per percent on the PM G3/400 which take about 1 hour 20 minutes on the dual 800.

I've been moving the work folder, unitinfo.txt, and queue.dat to the other machine. Everything gets done, the machines are happier and the folding gets done at better speeds.
 
hvfsl:

At the moment Macs are a lot slower than PCs at a lot of things, but expect the 1.8Ghz to be a lot faster than the 3Ghz P4 when it comes out.
Click to expand...
No, actually don't expect that. I'm sure the 970 will fly in Photoshop, but SPEC illustrates nicely that the 970 will often be slower when it doesn't have the hand-written opimization (which is not permitted in SPEC). Testing a processor without those hand-written optimizations is important because it takes a lot of time to do them, and when a programmer/company is thinking about supporting Apple and its small marketshare, that programmer/company wants to do so easily and with good results (just a recompile, ideally). Aceshardware talked about the PPC970 SPEC issue some time ago http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=60000475 and said:

Running at 1.8 GHz on a 0.13-micron process, the PowerPC 970 is estimated to deliver 937 SPECint2000 and 1051 SPECfp2000. By comparison, the current 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 achieves 1085 SPECint2000 Base and 1092 SPECfp2000 Base. These numbers have raised some concern regarding the performance of the 1.8 GHz PowerPC 970 upon its introduction towards the end of next year...
Click to expand...
It does help that Apple will apparently be getting 970's out before the end of the year, but then Intel released the 3ghz P4 on the 800mhz FSB, and got even higher scores, as one might expect. According to http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html#SPECint and http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html#SPECfp on the "Intel D875PBZ motherboard" lines Intel can get 1164/1200 integer and 1213/1229 float. You may at this point call SPEC irrelevant, but like I say it reflects non-hand optimized code speed, and if you're doing the sorts of things it tests http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/docs/readme1st.html (see question #11) then it does matter.

MrMacman:

I see, but still no where near what we are gonna get out of the 970 hypertransport.
Click to expand...
Hypertransport isn't even close to as big a deal as you seem to think. All the 970 might use it for is connecting chipset chips to each other just like nVidia has been doing since the Xbox and the 1st nForce. It's good, but not very exciting.
 
Reading from the Stanford forums the other day, I found that the Gromacs core has been re-worked and will be quite a bit faster so reality will look more like those statistics we saw early on.

There was no definite timeframe for the new core to be placed into production but I would guess in the next month or so.
 
Originally posted by bousozoku
I've been moving the work folder, unitinfo.txt, and queue.dat to the other machine. Everything gets done, the machines are happier and the folding gets done at better speeds.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. I didn't know I could do that. I sometimes get Gromacs WUs on my iBook 600MHz, which take forever to finish, and I'd love to toss them over to my G4 iMac instead.

I also recruited a new P4 2GHz PC at my work yesterday, and its output is incredible!
 
jimthorn:

Just wait till someone tries out a 2ghz G5. :D That'll probably get Macs back into the race.
 
Originally posted by ddtlm
jimthorn:

Just wait till someone tries out a 2ghz G5. :D That'll probably get Macs back into the race.
Click to expand...
as soon as they come out at the apple stores, i'm all over 'em like red ants on a spilt snow cone
 
notice me installing it or notice it on the machines?

just play ignorant and u look like the majority of customers that come through there. unless u go there all the time and they know ur face.

if they do notice me i could care less really. have ur finger on cmd-q and deny everything.
 
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