Let’s start with the good news, shall we? In the Folding For Charity competition between Tom’s Hardware and AnandTech, everyone was a winner (I know, it’s trite), most particularly Folding@Home, the distributed computing program organized by Stanford University to apply spare computing resources to battle crippling and deadly diseases.
Between our two publications, we accumulated 508,647,874 points. We also spurred yet another competitor, The Tech Report, to join in the fun to maintain its ranking. It’s worth noting that AnandTech and Hardware Canucks also do yearly battle for the cause.
Here’s more good news: Tom’s Hardware climbed up a few notches in the global leaderboards from the time the race was announced, and our folding team is now ranked 22nd in the world (as of this writing). At our current pace, our team could break into the top 20 by the end of December. The Tom’s Hardware Folding team also doubled its normal weekly output during the race.
In short: Wow! And congratulations. And most of all, thank you.
Now of course, there’s other news, and I’ve been putting this off . . . but I’ve got to hand it to the AnandTech Folding team, which soundly spanked us this time around. Although Tom’s Hardware accumulated 212,467,005 points, AnandTech managed to garner 296,180,869. While Tom’s Hardware was doubling its weekly output, AnandTech’s tripled. Indeed, as of now, the AnandTech team has leapt in front of Tom's Hardware, and is ranked 21st.
Sincerely, congratulations to AnandTech.
However, maybe I’m biased, but although AnandTech's point volume was higher, I’d like to think our point quality was superior. Also, I think these numbers are a little dubious, potentially influenced by Russian hackers. I hear the CIA is looking into it. And although I am not sanctioning the effort, I understand that some have called for a recount. I mean, knowing that AnandTech editor-in-chief Ryan Smith was on vacation during the contest, did he leave his massive stash of GPUs fired up and folding while he was away?
Regardless, I am determined that we will come out on top when we meet again.
