Perfomrance comparison of GPU boards from AMD as of Oct 2009

We have tested GPU borads from AMD with our test program implementing a simple N² force evaluation algorithm. A nominal performacne of each board is shown in the following table.

board	arch	clock	memory	No.SC	SPmul-add	DPadd	DPmul	BW
HD4850	RV770	625 MHz	DDR3 662 MHz 256bit	800	1040 GFLOPS	208 GFLOPS	104 GFLOPS	63.6 GB/sec
HD4870	RV770	750 MHz	DDR5 900 MHz 256bit	800	1200 GFLOPS	240 GFLOPS	120 GFLOPS	115.2 GB/sec
HD4770	RV740	750 MHz	DDR5 800 MHz 128bit	640	960 GFLOPS	192 GFLOPS	96 GFLOPS	51.2 GB/sec
HD5870	RV870	850 MHz	DDR5 1.2 GHz 256bit	1600	2720 GFLOPS	544 GFLOPS	272 GFLOPS	153.6 GB/sec

The program is basically same as our demo program posted here. The demo program should work on 5870 but I did not test it.

Note

• We count one-force-interaction as 38 FP operations. This is a traditional flop-count in this field.
• At large N, 5870 shows 2.2x better performance than 4870. it It reaches ~ 2.2 Tflops.
• 4850 and 4770 show identical performance. Memory BW is not critical at all in this test program.

Benchmark system

CPU	Core2 E8400 3.0 GHz
MB	Asus P5E WS
Memory	DDR2 800 1 GB x 4
Power unit	Schythe CorePower3 600W
OS	Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64 2.6.24-23-generic
Catalyst	9.9
CAL version	1.4beta

This system looks old but PCIe bus on this board is faster than any other systems we have so far.