Home Gaming Why we won't see folding@Home on the Xbox 360

Why we won't see folding@Home on the Xbox 360

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I have posted before about people speculating that the Xbox 360 would be better at folding that the PS3. 

It has even been rumoured that Bill Gates himself wants the 360 to be used for folding, so why has this not happened yet?

Well Digital Media Thoughts have a new opinion and they may actually be onto something.

Basically they are saying that Microsoft cannot afford to ever put folding on the xbox 360 as the strain that the program will put on the system will cause it to overheat and give us the infamous red ring of death… Basically it’s down to a architectural problem with the Xbox 360…

The one thing I don’t understand though is how is it possible that Microsoft have not fixed their reliability problems yet? How hard can this really be?

Link to Digital Media Thoughts – Digital Media News & Views

Last Updated: May 14, 2007

5 Comments

  1. Ruslan

    May 14, 2007 at 10:59

    As far as i care the X360 is a gaming console unlike its Sony counterpar which glorifies it as a “PC”, so it would be wise to let the cell processors do the folding@home. Its funny how people keep trying to pin faults into the X360 simply coz it cant do folding@home yet they dont mention its superior elements when compared to the PS3.

    Besides, with over 12 million X360s in service and the failure ration being less than 1% isnt that something to write about?

    Reply

  2. papa-action

    May 14, 2007 at 12:20

    The XBox360 reliability issue can not simply be limited to the context of running folding@home. If it has reliability issues under load then that has implications with regard to how far developers can push the hardware as well as for the overall lifespan of the hardware in the console. Of course, they did mange to get GOW running on it and it almost certainly pushes the system to the limit. It would be interesting to see what kind of load it exerted on the system.

    BTW, MS have apparently stated that the failure rate is between 3%-5% with rumours if it being significantly higher. The industry standard being 3%.

    Reply

  3. LazySAGamer

    May 14, 2007 at 13:14

    I have heard rumours of a 10% failure rate but that does seem a bit extreme…

    However I don’t think GOW is pushing the Xbox 360 to it’s limit, GOW is only a 2nd gen game and time has proven that developers never reach the limit on the 2nd gen game….

    Reply

  4. Ruslan

    May 14, 2007 at 14:24

    Correct. The latest batch of 2nd gen games is going to hit us in the next 6 months. After that we can expect more titles to push the X360’s and PS3’s hardware even further.

    Reply

  5. papa-action

    May 14, 2007 at 14:49

    No doubt, they will certainly be able to squeeze more results out per CPU cycle in the later gen games as the code gets more efficient.

    What I was referring to is the actual CPU and GPU % utilization. I’m sure that every game released is best effort i.e they will (or should) use all available resources to get the best possible performance at that point in time based on present knowledge. Are there any stats anywhere to should what kind of load is placed placed on the console’s CPU and GPU by the current gen games? As the code gets more efficient they can get more from the available resources but they still limited by the hardware. If the system is going to blow when you run at 100% utilization for a certain period of time then this certainly adds an additional constraint.

    Reply

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