I think that in the next year or two Intel and Nvidia will be competing head to head on the cpu market. NVIDIA thanks Intel for saying GPUs are 'only' 14 times faster than CPUs By Donald Melanson <http://www.engadget.com/editor/donald-melanson> <http://www.engadget.com/editor/donald-melanson/rss.xml> posted Jun 24th 2010 1:52PM
<http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/nvidia-thanks-intel-for-saying-gpus-are-only-14-times-faster-t/> Well, we've gone a full month since the last episode<http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/24/nvidia-intels-moorestown-is-like-an-elephant-on-a-diet-ipad-s/>of NVIDIA's and Intel's ongoing <http://www.engadget.com/tag/intel,nvidia> public feud, but it looks like Intel has now stoked the flames once again (albeit inadvertently) in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Computer Architecture. That attempted to debunk the "100X GPU vs. CPU myth," but it also contained the tidbit that GPUs are "only" up to 14 times faster than CPUs in running application kernels, which NVIDIA has more than a happily latched onto. In a blog post, NVIDIA's Andy Keane says that it's a "rare day" when a competitor states that their technology is *only* 14x faster, and that he can't recall another time when he's "seen a company promote competitive benchmarks that are an order of magnitude slower." Of course, he then further goes on to note that Intel's tests were done with NVIDIA's previous generation GeForce GTX 280, and that the codes were simply run out-of-the-box without any optimization -- but, still, he seems more than happy to accept this bit of "recognition." In Intel's defense, however, the overall finding of the paper (linked below) is that the performance gap between a GTX 280 GPU and Core i7 960 processor is actually just 2.5X "on average," which NVIDIA hasn't highlighted for some reason. -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/
