I realize the hardware are different vintage. I am really concerned with how 
AMD compares to NVIDIA specifically with global atomic operations. In the 
initial profiling and researching I had done the culprit appeared to be the 
global atomic addition i.e. the conclusion was AMD is slower than NVIDIA when 
doing global atomic addition period. BUT, crusaderky's comment about the 32 vs 
64 threads being held up during operations got me thinking. So I dug in to the 
NVIDIA Profiler and found that about 30% of the threads were idle and most were 
idle in a search function. I had originally written this search function using 
a brute force method. Now I have adjusted it to use a binary search. AND, I 
think crusaderky hit the nail on the head and pushed it through the board. The 
times I get now are a lot faster. The AMD card showed an ~10x speed up (344 
seconds down to 39 seconds) and the NVIDIA card showed an ~5x speed up (11 
seconds down to 2.5 seconds). Since the speed up is double for the AMD card I 
infer it was holding up 64 threads in this search function while the NVIDIA 
card was holding up only 32 threads. Removing this hold up is the key, thanks 
crusaderky! I have yet to do much with the memory access. That is the next task.

This does set my mind at ease concerning buying a laptop with an AMD card or an 
NVIDIA card, either will probably due in the long run as long as I keep my 
algorithms efficient. ☺

Thanks again
Reese

From: William Shipman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 3:10 PM
To: Joe Haywood
Cc: Pyopencl
Subject: Re: [PyOpenCL] Opinions

Just thought I should point that the FirePro V4800 is 3 years older than the 
GTX 780 Ti and has far fewer cores. Its bandwidth to global memory is 57.6 GB/s 
vs the 780 Ti's 336.5 GB/s. Comparing the two is pointless, the FirePro V4800 
will always lose.

On 14 August 2015 at 19:12, CRV§ADER//KY 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Look up opencl / cuda coalesced memory access on stack overflow, there's plenty 
of threads there


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