How do the various major processors and platforms perform with the Distributed Folding client?
The AMD K7 series of processors, also known as the Athlon series, perform very well with the Distributed Folding client. Processors based upon the K7 core perform very well on a clock per clock basis when compared with other processor architectures and also have absolute performance that appears to be matched or exceeded only by higher end Nortwood core Pentium 4 CPUs. The K7 line of processors do scale in performance with the enhancements made to the processor core, such as with the “Thunderbird” and “Palomino” cores. Using DDR SDRAM with these processors provides a performance increase but is not required to get good performance out of the “Athlon” or “K7” processors. Any Athlon XP processor using DDR SDRAM on a quality chipset (ex. KT266a/KT333/SiS735) will provide very high performance on the Distributed Computing project and this appears to be the best price/performance value available. The G3 and G4 appear to perform approximately equal to a Pentium III CPU at a given clock speed
