Re: Fwd: [Discuss-gnuradio] AMD Phenom II X6 1055T

[Juha Vierinen]

Juha passes beer to Marcus and orders one for himself,

I'm always curious of what hardware gives the most bang per buck -- so
I think I'll take a look at this new Phenom CPU. Maybe AMD is really a
serious contender again. From what I read, the AMD/ATI GPUs are faster
than NVidia offering currently, so I should be looking at the ATI
OpenCL toolkit, but I just haven't got around to doing it yet. Maybe
the same also applies to CPUs as well.

On the GPU issue that you pointed out: yes, you have to minimize the
bandwidth between the GPU RAM and the CPU RAM. The CPU-GPU bus is
fast, but it is not fast enough yet. There is no sense in eg., sending
a vector for just a FFT and then copying it back. All my current
problems allow me the send the data to the GPU, where I do nearly all
the heavy lifting, before sending the results back to the CPU RAM.
Managing all this is much easier than SSE programming IMHO. The reason
why I am all hyped up about CUDA is that I got a 50x speed up with
very minimal knowledge of GPU programming. All I did was a trivial
parallelization of my functions. The CUDA environment is very close to
ANSI C, so it wasn't very difficult to grasp for a non-programmer like
me. The learning and coding took only about one week -- time well
invested Í think.

juha

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 04:20, Marcus D. Leech <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 04/28/2010 08:46 PM, Juha Vierinen wrote:
>> How many SSE instructions can AMD do per clock cycle nowadays? A
>> couple of years ago Intel could do 1 per clock cycle and AMD could
>> only do 1/2, which was a huge downer for AMD. If they can now do 1 SSE
>> per clock cycle, they might be back in the game, which would be a
>> really good thing in terms of competition.
>>
>>
> Looking at a few benchmarks, it looks like the Phenom II X6 1055T is
> very very
>  comparable in FP performance to the Core 2 Quad QX9770, which is a very
> nice
>  performer indeed.
>
>
> --
> Marcus Leech
> Principal Investigator
> Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
> http://www.sbrac.org
>
>
>