OpenCL Benchmarks and Support for Both MacBook Pro GPUs

[VoR]

Agreed. This is pretty much a worthless benchmark. There's nothing complex taking place, no hard memory thrashing, no difficult calculations.

It's just taking 2 arrays with 5000 numbers in them and adding them together into a new array of 5000 numbers. Simple atomic add operations of 2 numbers over and over and over. The more cores you have the more you can split the array up (4 cores = each core processes 1250 items, 32 cores = each core processes 156.25 items.) and the faster clock means that each item gets processed faster.

This is NOT AT ALL indicative of a real OpenCL app that will be doing hundreds of thousands of difficult computations, with dependancies between the dat and working across huge datasets.

I'd say ignore every result we get out of this app. It's not at all indicative of real-world performance in the least.

I found the phoronix.com benchmark (and/or reviews) a lot more interesting than this thread

 

[jdiamond]

8600GT vs 9600m

Apple's own website at one point showed the 8600GT as having double the performance of the 9600M. The difference is the 8600GT is more power hungry and less flexible in its programming. Also, your 8600 is getting such good performance because it is somehow over clocked - most ran at just 900MHz while yours is at 1040. So yes - the 8600GT can smoke most modern laptop GPUs - but it caused an over heating nightmare for Apple.

This is interesting - my 2007 MacBook Pro 17" 2.6GHz (MacBookPro3,1) produces the following results:

Number of OpenCL devices found: 2
OpenCL Device # 0 = GeForce 8600M GT
Device 0 is an: GPU with max. 1040 MHz and 32 units/cores
Now computing - please be patient....
time used: 2.368 seconds

OpenCL Device # 1 = Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7800 @ 2.60GHz
Device 1 is an: CPU with max. 2600 MHz and 2 units/cores
Now computing - please be patient....
time used: 14.080 seconds

Which seems to be better performance than some of the newer similar-spec models. Perhaps caused by the 32 unit/cores on the 8600 vs the 9400?

[)amien