GPU and CPU Double Precision Performance

After checking some data from wikipedia, vendor's specifications and so on, I made this chart above. The chart is about GPU and CPU performance in double precision. While the Intel Core I7 980X (extreme edition) gives us around 110GFLOPS (Source: Tom's Hardware), GPUs such as AMD Radeon 6970 and NVidia C2090 offer more than 660GFLOPS. Obviously these benchmarks represent peak performance under specific conditions for each platform.

First OpenCL demo

This demo of OpenCL on NVIDIA GPU was based on early non-released OpenCL API/driver interface. The nbody simulation shown was a simulation of massive particles under the influence of physical forces. Nbody simulation is known to be computationally intensive. The demo shows how OpenCL can deliver high performance computing using the parallel cores of the CUDA architecture on NVIDIA GPUs. This demo also illustrates the idea that core computational code can be written in OpenCL and will scale to whatever number of cores are available. The demo shown in Siggraph used the 32 parallel cores available on the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M GPU that it ran on.

The first public demonstration of OpenCL running on a GPU was done by NVIDIA on December 12, 2008 at Siggraph Asia.