I've got two things on my mind:

1. Why does anyone think, that a cheaper product (HW&SW) with a shorter development time period can do the same work as a much more mature (and therefore more expensive) one?
2. Why do some volunteers think that the researchers volunteered to please them?

Any progress on the AMD side of things?

AMD just put out a new revision of their OpenCL SDK, so we'll be taking another look in the new year. However, based on past experience, I don't expect to see the performance and stability necessary to justify the additional effort.

Matt

At POEM the OpenCL performance of HD7000 GPUs with GCN increased by ~30% with the Cat 12.11 beta drivers. POEM is probably limited by task switching and data transfers.. but there's been some progress :)

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

At POEM the OpenCL performance of HD7000 GPUs with GCN increased by ~30% with the Cat 12.11 beta drivers. POEM is probably limited by task switching and data transfers.. but there's been some progress :)

Was that 30% going from 12.8 > 12.11 or 12.10 > 12.11? There was a large increase in performance with the 12.9 beta drivers and consolidated in the 12.10 release, and now another performance increase with the 12.11 beta. The AMD driver guys are busy. The increases were very significant for 5xxx and 6xxx GPUs too.

It would be interesting to have a 12.12 legacy release (much like they did with the 12.6 legacy drivers) to support some of the earlier cards. The 40nm 4770 is still a relatively efficient cruncher on some projects considering it's low power draw.

From what I heard (don't have a GCN card yet) it's ~30% from 12.8 (or earlier) to 12.11 beta whatever. Personally I've seen a 10% (accumulated) increase for an HD6970 - which is still significant at POEM.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

From what I heard (don't have a GCN card yet) it's ~30% from 12.8 (or earlier) to 12.11 beta whatever. Personally I've seen a 10% (accumulated) increase for an HD6970 - which is still significant at POEM. MrS

My 5850s and 5870s are all showing improvement in the 30% range. A little less with my lone 5770.

I've got two things on my mind:

1. Why does anyone think, that a cheaper product (HW&SW) with a shorter development time period can do the same work as a much more mature (and therefore more expensive) one?
2. Why do some volunteers think that the researchers volunteered to please them?

@1: according to performance comparison chart @einstein
http://www.dskag.at/images/Research/EinsteinGPUperformancelist.pdf
the HD7970 is in the same performance range as the GTX690. If you include power consumption to your personnel comparison it might change your mind.
@2: The question amd-app yes or no is a very old question here. The last post from a dev I can remember was: atm the amd openCL has very poor performance but stay tuned and keep the checkbox for beta apps checked. So why should I not come in from time to time and ask about the progress of this question?

As MrS posted earlier
You're of course welcome to report on OpenCL progress and ask about the current state..
I will do that in the future as I made it some days ago, and be shure, I don't get mad at the developers if no progress is there.

Alexander

1: The hardware is powerful, I'm sure we can all agree on this. But the VLIW5 and VLIW4 cards have also been pretty powerful.. depending on which code you fed them.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Well, maybe nVidia fits the needs of this project better than AMD does; situation at other projects may be different. For shure it is changing from time to time.[edit] or better: from generation to generation.
The current situation is only a snapshot of a long way to the 'supercomputing tablet'. The next step can possibly found here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone.
Maybe in two years many of us will crunch with a farm of small gpu-addon-cards.
I found the link in the Einstein forum.

Alexander

Any news? Or do i need continue in other projects?

No news on the AMD front, as far as I know.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002