Folding Contest: The Results Are In

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.

Fritz Nelson
Fritz Nelson is Editor-at-Large of Tom's Hardware US.
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Well done to both teams, and thank you for contributing to worthy causes in both compute power and dollars. :-)
    Reply
  • StitchExperiment626
    Couldn't be gracious losers. AnAndtech wasn't dramatic about winning.
    Reply
  • greenmachineiijh
    To whom it may concern; WOW. Tom's IS being gracious. Do you really thing they are serious about Russian hackers? It is a very light-hearted joke at its most basic with a concede and congrats to AnandTech for a job well done. Almost even a poke at Tom's.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I think "soundly spanked" is going too far. We got 71.7% as many points as they did. That's a clear victory, for sure. But they "soundly spanked" Hardware Canucks, who got only 31.7% of their score.

    My rationale is that because the possible range of scores is so vast, you can't look at these like sports scores. IMO, being within half an order of magnitude is a fairly close race.

    Next time, perhaps we should team up with the Canucks. Our combined score would've beaten Anandtech by about 3.4%.
    Reply
  • RomeoReject
    Bit_User, in defense of my country, we have about 10% of just America's population, 31.7% is pretty darn good for the size of the userbase. =P
    Reply
  • bentonsl_2010
    STITCHEXPERIMENT626 Dec 13, 2016, 12:08 PM
    Couldn't be gracious losers. AnAndtech wasn't dramatic about winning.

    LOL are you serious?....

    "The same sentiment goes to the team over at Tom’s Hardware as well. Although their leadership under my counterpart, Fritz Nelson, turned out to be lacking"
    by Ryan Smith on December 13, 2016 10:00 AM EST
    Reply
  • 10esseetony
    Sorry BIT_USER, but 14,000,000 points per day CLEARLY is "soundly spanked". No amount of variation of points awarded per randomly assigned work unit can account for that.

    GTX980- 350k-400k ppd.
    GTX 980Ti- up to 500k-650k ppd.
    GTX1070- up to 650-700k ppd.
    GTX1080- 800k-1.1M ppd.

    You were quite simply pummeled AND got your world ranking taken from you! Ah ha ha ha ha ah ha, cough cough, ugh, asthma kicked in with that maniacal laugh. ;)

    The good news for Tom's is that we (TeAm Anandtech) already did our upgrading for a few years. Now you guys get the advantage of the 1080Ti (possibly) coming out (pushing down 1070/1080 prices) along with new cards from AMD. So perhaps you guys will show up next year with some updated hardware, and show us what a sound spanking is all about. ;)

    ***************
    Indeed Tom's was gracious, Anandtech not as much.

    Although, on a serious note, I worry that "AnandTech editor-in-chief Ryan Smith ...did he leave his massive stash of GPUs fired up and folding...?" might be taken seriously by those who STILL think Hillary won. I assure you Ryan did not. Our top 3 contributors, who DO have massive stashes of (modern) GPU's, put out 8.2 million+, 6.3 million+, and 3.3 million+, per day. A few other new users hit 1 million or better, but not many.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    18999306 said:
    Bit_User, in defense of my country, we have about 10% of just America's population, 31.7% is pretty darn good for the size of the userbase. =P
    Good point. I've got nothing but respect for Canada, BTW.

    So, let's team up, next year. It'll be the "Hardware" sites vs. Anand.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    19000656 said:
    Sorry BIT_USER, but 14,000,000 points per day CLEARLY is "soundly spanked". No amount of variation of points awarded per randomly assigned work unit can account for that.
    I wasn't trying to detract from anyone's victory. Just pointing out that the contributions of various CPUs, GPUs, and phones varies so wildly, as does users' access to office or institutional machines. You could easily have competitions like this with disparities on the order of 10:1 or 100:1. So, that's why I think it's more appropriate look at it on a logarithmic scale.

    In fact, If we do exactly that, the points totals come out as:

    AnandTech: 8.47
    Toms: 8.33
    Canucks: 7.83
    Still, no matter how you look at it, the rankings don't change. So, yours was a job well done. Congratulations.
    Reply
  • alextheblue
    18998954 said:
    Couldn't be gracious losers. AnAndtech wasn't dramatic about winning.
    Warning! System fault detected in humor module.
    Reply