Folding@Home Coronavirus Race, AnandTech vs. Tom’s Hardware: Two Week Check-In
by Ryan Smith on April 3, 2020 1:00 PM EST
As many of us are stuck at home these days and are slowly quickly going mad, a couple of weeks ago we kicked off a race of sorts with our loyal opposition, Tom’s Hardware. Challenging each other to put an end to the very thing that’s keeping us at home – the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 – we have been racing to see which team can contribute the most work towards the Folding@Home project’s coronavirus distributed computing research efforts. The popular project has already passed an exaFLOP per second in compute performance thanks to Team AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware, and numerous other contributors over the world, and there is still much work to be done for its important research tasks.
Meanwhile, as we’re now at just past the half-way point in our four-week race, I wanted to stop and take stock of things. To see how the humble Team Anandech was faring against the boastful brutes that are the Tom’s Hardware team. And after two weeks, it looks like things are coming up great for Team AnandTech.
Since the race started on March 18th, Team AnandTech has generated 2.45 billion points in work for the Folding@Home project. In the same time period, the Tom’s Hardware team has generated a sizable, but not quite as massive 2 billion points of work. This has put Team AnandTech 445 million points ahead of Tom’s Hardware, or to put this in terms of the ongoing rate, Team AnandTech has been turning in 1.2 points’ worth of work for every point that Tom’s Hardware turns in. Which in the big picture, is actually a rather close race.
As such, with two weeks to go, this race is far from over. Our loyal competition could still turn things around, and so Team AnandTech cannot rest on its laurels. That means we still need you! Both to help Team AnandTech cross the finish line, and to hopefully get out of our homes just that much sooner.
So please stop by the AnandTech Distributed Computing forum to see how you can download the Folding@Home client and join Team AnandTech.
Ultimately this race is for fun, but it’s also for a good cause. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a world-changing event, and, along with the immediate medical risks of the virus, the containment measures it requires are intense. The Folding@Home project is working on several simulations to improve humanity’s understanding of the virus and the disease it causes, with a goal of jump-starting new treatments and to bring the virus under control. It’s a worthy cause, as a result I’d like to encourage everyone to take part in what’s left of our race over the next two weeks.
Carousel Image Courtesy of: CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS
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yannigr2 - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Tom's Hardware might be the biggest and most known site, but most people who follow PC tech news for over 10 years will prefer to support Anandtech than a site that ... well it's Tom's,... where do I start?...... :DZipSpeed - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I used to enjoy Tom's in the good old days. Nowadays, I don't bother with that site anymore, as they tend to be very one sided with certain vendors. I guess you have to bend over for those that flash the dollar bills.Samus - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
Anand built this site on integrity. I'd say the next closest person back in that era was Kyle from HardOCP. Tom has a great engineering mind but I agree there is sometimes an aura of bias in his reviews, though admittedly I haven't read a modern Tom's Hardware review in years.But 20 years ago, I remember buying Tom's book, and that was really his magnum opus, not his site. Though credit is due to him for discovering the defect and fighting Intel for the recall of the defective P3 1.13's.
Slash3 - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
Tom hasn't been involved with the website for over ten years. He moved to Singapore and has been happy to remain fairly low profile, though he had recently been part of a VR startup there.Time flies.
eek2121 - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
Wait until you realize how long Anand has been gone from AnandTech. ;)Slash3 - Monday, April 6, 2020 - link
I've been visiting AT since it was a GeoCities page. Well aware. :)svan1971 - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't blatantly obvious, and they if did not arrogantly deny it the way they do.twtech - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
I used to go to both, but they disabled comments on their articles a while back.Slash3 - Saturday, April 4, 2020 - link
Their comments aren't consistent, with some articles having them and others sometimes appearing days later or not at all. I get the feeling that they're disabled by default and some daytime contributors either don't know to flip the switch or don't care. It's frustrating.eek2121 - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
I stopped visiting tom’s hardware when they started embedding autoplay videos and injecting massive amounts of ads into their content. Part of what I do is writing, publishing, and managing content, and even that part of me cringes when I accidentally land on their site. I now have to run an ad-blocker, because of the sheer amount of sites that are just like Tom’s Hardware. I don’t mind an ad every few paragraphs, if the ad is interesting enough, I will even click on it. However, having 5/10 ads per page is ridiculous.My personal opinion is that certain parts of AnandTech are going up in quality, but article quantity and the site in general is going downhill. I wish AnandTech would follow the model of sites like Ars Techinca and stop heading in the gradual direction of Tom’s Hardware.