Well, we've gone a full month since the
last episode of NVIDIA's and Intel's
ongoing 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.
posted June 24th 2010 1:52PM
Can you 2 just hug and make up? I need both of you inside my PC.
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake
get ATI then...it works wonderfully inside my laptop! (=
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake: Something about that just doesn't sound right
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake
I agree. Intel, must you force me to choose between having a 320M or a Core i5/i7 rather than just having both.
@ashwinkn
What are you talking?
You are supposed to have both.
How can you have a CPU without the GPU?
Unless, you're talking about the Integrated GPU.
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake Intel wants to take up both slots with Xeon DP.
@metafor
If Intel can run crysis 2 by itself I wouldn't mind DP or even TP.
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake Well i think that's the point, I want to hear how they tested running a program on just a GPU, this is a very confusing version of competition
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake
... That's what ...she said?
@Revolutionary
I am referring to the 320m in the 13" MacBook pro, which is stuck with the older Core 2 Duo's.
@ashwinkn The 320M is a poor chip; do you have to get a Macbook? As is always the case, you can certainly get a better graphics card in another PC for the same price (and probably a better processor too).
@ashwinkn
The fact that your macbook is stuck with old tech has nothing to do with Intel - that's Apple's usual 'generation behind' approach.
Go out and buy an Alienware M11X with i7 & 335M GFX. oooh yeah :)
@serge
Or AMD. It won't have the SLI support, but AMD runs beautifully and NVIDIA works just fine in it. My desktop has both running together.
@HowMuchArtCanYouTake
If NVIDIA can run Windows by itself I wouldn't mind ditching the CPU. Oh wait...
I think that picture overestimates the worth of Intel's parts.
@Colours I have a slow clap for you.
I measured it.
It doesn't.
Marketing 101: when selling your product, don't state the competition as 14 times better than you as an argument.
@serge
As someone who uses a few CUDA programs like Bodaboom I can tell you 14 is a huge understatement.
@serge Except this wasn't marketing. This was a paper presented at a symposium where the experts actually meet and discuss/present their technology.
@JXCGunrunna
Exactly...NVIDIA's CUDA + GPUs with 2 or 4 way SLI straight up owns anything Intel has to offer...It's been proven multiple times...hell, check out the Fastra project.
@DoctarPeppar
I wonder what Fastra would look like with 4 GTX480 cards.
@serge
but they said "only".
@blazinsmokey well...since you put it that way, then it is A-OK! lol
@serge Omg, my name is Serge, too. Woot.
@serge And the best part of it is they compare a $600 CPU to a $300 video card. Lets make it fair: i7 960 is around 25 times slower than 2xGTX280 ;) 3 times given away to SLI as it can't provide a 100% speed bump per card :)
I don't think nVidia is going to mention that they could use their GPU's to cook lunch for the attendees.
I kid though, because the performance could be enough to offset the power consumption difference in most cases.
@potretr
Must we bring up iOS in a completely irrelevant setting.
@potretr Not even close...
Because we all know that Intel is great at making GPUs...
Both are different products with different jobs, why such a feud?
@TheJake
Not exactly. These days you can build a super computer by simply adding NVIDIA cards to your rig.
@TheJake
because they're beginning to trend on each another's turfs. Nvidia are promoting GPU based coding which can do the jobs of a CPU and Intel are integrating GPUs into their CPU units.
@TheJake
Because NVIDIA's options for supercomputing are actually really awesome. Check out the Fastra project for more details.
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html
Intel can not compete with those results on that price level.
@Kanpai888
Difference is if you can do it with an nvidia GPU it's likely a very parallel task which will run an order of magnitude faster but intels GPUs are still useless for everything but running Aero.
@Bratyr and playing hd movies on your HDTV using super little battery life on your laptop
intels 4500 + gpus are great.
they use like no power, and provide alot of performance for the power.
@frauhottelmann Funny, since the snapdragons are the fastest consumer mobile phone processors available.
CPU's are totally different than GPU's.
It's totally unfair to compare them directly.
Plus, if you compare the size of a GPU and CPU.
I can say that a GTX 480 is 14 times bigger than the size of Intel's i7 960.
@Revolutionary
Have you ever looked at a GPU die?
They aren't that far apart... Their fans are just shaped differently, and they have to use a board, so therefore include all of the controllers and memory on the PCI-e board. Most of the board space is so that there's a reasonable amount of space to dissipate the heat. The heat generation is what makes it so huge.
@Revolutionary Actually 960 can't work without a motherboard and a typical ATX motherboard is WAY bigger than GTX 480.
I don't want to see a day when nvidia gpu's are incompatible with intel cpu's
@weinerschnitzelboy
I do. Ati and Nvidia should abandon Intel so Intel can see how it feels
@DefPoet well ATi is owned by AMD so i would find it strange for them to support Intel. i could be wrong though.
Yeah but GPUs are pretty damn hard to program in the first place, let alone optimise. They are also limited to a smaller set of programming problems (basically operations on large matrices).
@potretr
Oh please, just shut the hell up.
Why compare, when both processors are equally perfect for phones.
I think NVIDIA knew it's only ~10x all the way, just baited Intel into saying it by intentional boasting...
@GaryZ
Gpu. Are way faster than just 10x. Try using a program like badaboom. And you will see
@DefPoet
*Sigh* Yes, for video editing, a GPU does math operations on matrix equations, because those draw and manipulate polygons and whatnot, so a GPU is heavily optimized for "drawing" while a CPU does everything else.
Having said that, I take AMD+ATI over anything else, but I'm enjoying this feud, for the good cartoons it produces.
@coolicer
Oh, by video editing, I meant anything that has to do with video, playback, transcoding etc...
@coolicer
video-related tasks are not the only ones that can take advantage of vector processing.
Everybody wants to see intel+google+Adobe vs Apple+nVidia+AMD?