Debunking the 100× GPU vs. CPU myth
Intel recently published a paper with no less than 12 authors called Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth: an evaluation of throughput computing on CPU and GPU where they criticize the huge performance discrepancies cited by researchers publishing about General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming in the context of what they call "throughput computing". We have also noticed bad science in this domain before. We tried to reproduce the incredible results of one paper, with a view to entering this market ourselves, only to discover they had used the reference implementation of LAPACK instead of the vendor tuned implementation for their CPU that was 10× faster. Like Intel, we found that the performance advantage of a GPU was relatively modest (2.5×) given the enormous costs and liabilities of using a GPU for number crunching. However, we are fortunate to be able to simply dismiss fantastical results as irrelevant propaganda but Intel are presumably feeling the pinch as misinformed cus...