So two years later and I’m finally posting. Phew! It was hard enough just finding time to write this. The short of it is that life happened, and I just didn’t have the time to keep going with the blog. Actually, I stopped folding as well, due to very high electricity costs in Connecticut (averaging about 18 cents per kWh, which is insane).
But now that our second child is a little less cranky, and now that we are out of that tiny apartment (we bought a house), I think I’m finally feeling settled enough to resume this blog.
Consider this a second kick-off.
As some of you have mentioned, the real computational power these days is in graphics cards. Actually, even when I was writing regularly two years ago, GPUs were the ticket to massive PPD and better efficiency. The reason I wasn’t talking about them was because I felt it was important to start where F@H started and discuss CPUs.
Over the years I have folded on many graphics cards. The list, as I recall it, goes as follows:
- NVidia Geforce 8400 GS (PCI)
- Nvidia Geforce 240 GT
- AMD Radeon 3870
- AMD Radeon 4870
- AMD Radeon 5870
- NVidia Geforce 460 GTX
- AMD Radeon 7970 HD
You’re probably looking at this list and thinking, wow, those are some old GPU’s. Well you’re right! Originally I was going to write a blog post about each one of them, and include tuning info and lots of pictures. Since I don’t have any of those GPUs anymore, with the exception of the 7970, that’s not going to happen. Oh well…
The takeaway of all those articles though would have been this: any of those GPUs (with the exception of the wimpy 8400) offered better performance and efficiency than the contemporary CPUs in the similar price range. The higher end graphics cards (7970) offer significantly more points per day performance, and although power consumption is typically higher than a CPU-only folding rig, the performance gains are exponential and efficiency is greater. This is because the massively parallel architecture of today’s graphics cards offers tremendous floating point computational capability compared to central processors.
Going forward, I plan to take a look at new graphics cards (think 2017 vintage). These cards generate anywhere from 100K PPD up to well over a million PPD. But first I need to describe my new power meter, which will be the focus of the next post.
Green Folding@Home 