Probably the idea was not pushed as hard in Japan due to a different market strategy or plainly because that marketing tool is not (yet) needed.

Regarding the questions from bakavic:
The cell processor can indeed calculate faster than most cpu’s. Interestingly the client developed for the ATI 1XXX cards is even much faster than the cell BUT there’s the catch. A PC cpu is the most flexible of them all. It can do a variety of calculations but at a slower speed. The GPU (graphics) client is lightning fast but it lacks almost any and all flexibility. It can only be used for a very narrow type of calculation.
The PS3’s cell core is somewhere in the middle – not as fast as the GPU and less flexible than the CPU.

You can’t do anything else on the PS3 while you are folding. The client is a standalone application that really uses all resources. If you want to use the PS3 for anything else, you need to stop the folding first. You can set folding to automatically start if the console is left idle for a time.
Highlight folding on the PS3 menu and press Triangle to bring up the menu to set automatic start, then select how long to wait if idle before starting (Off, 10 Minutes, 20 Minutes, etc)

Hope that clarified some issues.

Regards
Carsten
Team 68301 – Derek’s Wish

P.S. We can always use a new PS3 folder in our team

On a more realistic note, I believe the heat (and noise) put out by these things don’t make it nice to run in one-room apartments during summer.

The whole projects seems really cool to me though – wonder if the Cell processor in the PS3 can process faster than most desktop computers?

Btw, can you do anything else with the PS3 while it’s processing? Like surfing the web or something?