PSP Folding@home misses the point
The PS3′s app for Folding@home got an update today, and it allows you to run the program on your PSP. But this is kind of missing the point. See, Folding@home is meant to run during idle time. Normally when you walk away from your computer, you leave it on and waste all that idle time… Folding takes advantage of those otherwise wasted resources.
I don’t know about you, but normally when I’m not playing my PSP, it’s turned off. There are no normally-wasted cycles to take advantage of. Plus, are you willing to use up your battery power, and recharging cycles, running this thing? I’m not. I’ll stick to running it on the PC for now.
Update: Okay, the Playstation blog says that it’s the PS3 actually doing the folding – the PSP just controls the UI so you can carry that with you. Still, meh.
2 Comments »
Leave a comment!
Honestly, I’d much rather have my PSP download packets of Folding and let it fold, pluggged in, at my desk all day.
I’d want that much more than the Remote Play.
Some kind of idle time donation using the PSP would be nice, but I fear that doing Folding on a single-core CPU that’s roughtly the same as the roughly 300Mhz PS2 CPU would be so unbelievably slow as to be worthless.
Folding runs about 8x faster on the PS3 than it does on my single-core AMD 4000 CPU desktop at home.