Intel Admits GPUs Are 14 Times Faster than CPUs

It's a rare day in the world of technology when a company you compete with stands up at an important conference and declares that your technology is *only* up to 14 times faster than theirs. In fact in all the 26 years I've been in this industry, I can't recall another time I've seen a company promote competitive benchmarks that are an order of magnitude slower.

The landmark event took place a few hours ago at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in Saint-Malo, France, interestingly enough, the same event where our Chief Scientist Bill Dally is receiving the prestigious 2010 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his pioneering work in architecture for parallel computing.

At this event, Intel presented a technical paper where they showed that application kernels run up to 14 times faster on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 as compared with an Intel Core i7 960. Many of you will know, this is our previous generation GPU, and we believe the codes that were run on the GTX 280 were run right out-of-the-box, without any optimization. In fact, it's actually unclear from the technical paper what codes were run and how they were compared between the GPU and CPU. It wouldn't be the first time the industry has seen Intel using these types of claims with benchmarks... NVIDIA