AMD and SiSoftware Collaborate on Development of an Industry Benchmark Suite for OpenCL™

ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 graphics card performs up to 2.7 times faster than most powerful competing graphics card featuring two GPUs

What: AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced its involvement in the development of one of the first industry benchmark testing suites for OpenCL™. Released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010, the latest version of the award-winning utility first introduced in 1997. The benchmark suite includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks, and can be used to test OpenCL performance on ATI Stream technology.

Why: Heavy computational workloads have traditionally been processed on a CPU but the industry is shifting to a new computing paradigm that relies more on the GPU or a combination of GPU and CPU. OpenCL is the widely adopted industry standard for running parallel tasks on CPUs and GPUs using the same code. As the only hardware provider in the industry designing and delivering both high-performance CPU and GPU technologies, AMD is the only company providing a complete OpenCL development platform for the entire system.

Who: The developer community, ISVs and OEMs have been looking for a way to measure OpenCL-based system performance. The OpenCL benchmark suite from SiSoftware is a first step in giving the industry the tools it needs to accurately measure and assess system performance in order to make decisions with confidence.

Benefits: To test performance the SiSoftware OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite runs computationally intense algorithms like the Mandelbrot set. Working with SiSoftware, AMD has optimized the performance of the OpenCL benchmarks for its GPU implementations, and for some problems has demonstrated significant performance advantages using AMD’s ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL. When compared to NVIDIA’s CUDA running on its GeForce GTX 295 featuring two GPUs, the ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 graphics card with one GPU delivers up to 2.7 times faster performance on certain benchmark tests. For the "native float shader" results, the ATI Radeon 5870 posted a score of 1820 megapixels per second, compared to the GTX 295 at 680 megapixels per second1. AMD and SiSoftware are currently collaborating on measurement for AMD’s entire platform, including x86 CPUs.
Resources:

* For more information about the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark from SiSoftware visit the SiSoftware Sandra 2010 website.
* Follow ATI Stream updates on Twitter at @ATIStream
* Sign up for the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta Program
* More information about ATI Stream technology

About AMD

Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and technology partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit www.amd.com.

AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, ATI, the ATI logo, AMD Phenom, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

1 Based on native float shader results of 1820 megapixels per second for AMD compared to 680 megapixels for NVIDIA on AMD Phenom™ II X4 940 processor-based system, 3 GHz, ASUSTek M3A79-T DELUXE, 4GB DDR2-1066, Windows® 7 64-bit Enterprise operating system.

AMD configuration: ATI Radeon™ HD 5870, 1024MB video memory, Memory Clock 1200 MHz, Engine Clock 850 Mhz, Driver: 8.680.0.0, OpenCL base build, SDK 2.0 Beta 4. NVIDIA configuration: 879 MB Video Memory, Memory Clock 999 Mhz, Engine Clock 576 Mhz, Driver: 8.15.11.9038, additional settings: Multi GPU enabled through NVIDIA Control Panel.