New Xbox is water cooled - it must fold

NTX-Zoner · May 22, 2005

One thing that I find interesting is that the xbox proc appears to be descended from the Blue Gene processor core

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/bluegene499.html

http://sc-2002.org/paperpdfs/pap.pap207.pdf

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputer originally designed to calculate *shock* protien folding. The core were based off of a power pc 400mhz core. It utilized dual core tech and beefed up the mhz to 700. From the spec I read on the Xbox, it sounds like a new gen of the same.

blackhawk397 · Jun 29, 2005

I have heard from a couple of friends that the xbox 360 will be 300 bucks, the same as the ps3. It would be an exellent folder!

Yuriman · Jun 29, 2005

Steveo989 said:
If you search for ps3, the cell processor is the equivalent to 7/3.2ghz processors

Not true. In the best case scenario, and when the cpu is 100% used, it can be similar in performance to the XBox360 cpu. The problem is that all but one of the cores are so specialized that in most cases they cannot be used for anything at all.

Of course, xbox360's cpu really isn't all that great either. I just read a nice article on Anandtech, about how XBox360's total cpu power is only about twice that of the original xbox because of all that they cut out of it - for price reasons. It appears what Nintendo said is true.

Thread here: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=1626645

Unfortunantly, it appears Anandtech took the article down, hopefuly it will be back up soon.

Sjaak · Jun 30, 2005

Steveo989 said:
If you search for ps3, the cell processor is the equivalent to 7/3.2ghz processors

When executing certain instructions, yeah.

When doing normal x86 stuff it gets spanked.

Ven0m · Jun 30, 2005

Still you'd have to convince Stanford guys... Still, if there were other interesting distributed computing projects for it, like E@H, it would be cool.

darkknight187 · Jun 30, 2005

game consoles just werent built to be 24/7 machines so i would be willing to believe you wouldnt find as much support as you hope for.

Arkaine23 · Jun 30, 2005

These things are hot. A guy who was working for IBM designing Cell and its close relatives (their new server chip and Xbox cpu) was telling me something like >70 watts of heat per core. You wouldn't want to put 3 or 4 of those cores at full load for long periods of time unless you had the thing hooked up in your refridgerator. Think prescott times 2 or 2.5....

Also the previous discussions about binary incompatibility hold true. While I don't doubt Linux will make it over to these new consoles, Folding@home will not. Keep dreaming.

felinusz · Jun 30, 2005

Here's a thought I just had

Folding is a good thing, in the long term it benefits people a great deal.
Microsoft is a corporation, and is always looking for ways to benefit people, for public relations purposes.

If someone could send a convincing and well-written letter to a do-er at Microsoft, they may port the folding software to XBOX360 for us. I would imagine that with a small amount of effort, it could easily be implemented on XBOX360 off of a disc, like a normal XBOX game.

Ven0m · Jun 30, 2005

felinusz said:
Here's a thought I just had

Folding is a good thing, in the long term it benefits people a great deal.
Microsoft is a corporation, and is always looking for ways to benefit people, for public relations purposes.

If someone could send a convincing and well-written letter to a do-er at Microsoft, they may port the folding software to XBOX360 for us. I would imagine that with a small amount of effort, it could easily be implemented on XBOX360 off of a disc, like a normal XBOX game.

But problem isn't with Microsoft but with Stanford.

veryhumid · Nov 13, 2005

couple more weeks now, i hope it gets hacked to fold quickly

Ven0m · Nov 13, 2005

veryhumid said:
couple more weeks now, i hope it gets hacked to fold quickly

I trust in Stanford again after seeing all their effort in GPU folding - this way there's a chance that XBOX 360 will fold and with all its power.

veryhumid · Nov 13, 2005

it will probably end up using a linux client, right? any chance it could run windows?

Ven0m · Nov 13, 2005

veryhumid said:
it will probably end up using a linux client, right? any chance it could run windows?

It's totally different architecture. No chance to run Windows, unless MS guys decide to release one. Perhaps Stanford will release dedicated XBOX client in some time.

jcw122 · Nov 13, 2005

Wedo said:
The new Xbox is going to have three, 3.2Ghz IBM cpu's that are watercooled. So we have a trillion calcs per second on a gaming console with email/mp3 and other home media capabilities.

Someone, somewhere, must figure out how to make it fold.

Linky.

This has gotta be old....I read back in August it has a SINGLE quad core CPU...each core IIRC 3.2ghz each....BTW is that chip any good? Why hasne't IBM let AMD in on it?

kswaid · Nov 13, 2005

I don't see why everyone thinks microsoft will be receptive to using xbox 360's for folding. The problem is that microsoft is only making money off of software development fees. In fact, they are most likely losing money on each console they sell (the original xbox was this way when it was first released). So why would they promote the use of 360's for non-gaming purposes? I guess it is still worth a try, but don't get your hopes up.

Who · Nov 13, 2005

jcw122 said:
This has gotta be old....I read back in August it has a SINGLE quad core CPU...each core IIRC 3.2ghz each....BTW is that chip any good? Why hasne't IBM let AMD in on it?

Nope, it has one cpu with three cores. Wedo corrected himself later on in the thread to say it was a single CPU.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1877342,00.asp

New Xbox is water cooled - it must fold

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