AMD teams up with Sisoft on benchmarking

CHIPMAKER AMD is working with popular benchmarketing firm Sisoftware to develop an industry testing suite for OpenCL.

With some workloads particularly well suited to being heavily parallelised, GPGPUs have become increasingly popular as being significantly better suited to the task. Nvidia has largely led the charge with its CUDA initiative, but AMD has been pushing the OpenCL development architecture as a better industry standard.

The OpenCL benchmark is set to be added into Sisoft Sandra 2010 and will include remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features which can be used to test performance on ATI Stream technology.

According to Chimpzilla, the partnership is a response to calls from developers, ISVs and OEMs looking for a way to measure OpenCL-based system performance.

Sisoft Sandra 2010 will use computationally intense algorithms like the Mandelbrot set to test OpenCL GPGPU performance.

Given's Intel's dubious treatment of benchmarks, the move is likely to make a few people nervous about putting much trust in the results.

Reading statements like, "Working with SiSoftware, AMD has optimized the performance of the OpenCL benchmarks for its GPU implementations, and for some problems has demonstrated significant performance advantages using AMD's ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL," doesn't exactly inspire confidence about impartiality, but hopefully with AMD working directly with Sisoft, others adhering to the OpenCL standard will get a fair shake at the results. µ