Well, the Wii has a PowerPC processor running at 729 MHz. I have a few similarly-clocked PowerPCs, A G3 at 600 MHz, and a G4 at 500 MHz. Some quick calculations show that a 730 MHz G4 should produce about 600 points a day, if crunching 24 hours a day.
The big deal is that the PS3 uses "Cell" processors, which happen to do protein folding REALLY well. (Video card GPUs are equally good at it.) So it makes a lot of sense to port for such a monster. (My Google-fu is escaping me, but I recall seeing that the PS3 processor can do Folding@Home work about 10x as fast as a quad-core Core 2 Extreme. GPUs like the ATI Radeon X1950 are also 'well endowed' in this regard. Producing SIGNIFICANTLY more bang for the buck than a general purpose processor.) The trick is that they had to create new work units for these processors; because 'normal' work units actually DON'T perform as well, and the work units they are sending to them are so much slower on regular CPUs. So WCG would have to introduce a new project just for the PS3 (or GPUs,)
(The Wii wouldn't need a new project, it could theoretically run any project that any other PowerPC can run; it just wouldn't be very fast.) |
