Intel: GPUs are only up to 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.

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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.

The paper is called “Debunking the 100x GPU vs CPU Myth” and it is indeed true that not *all* applications can see this kind of speed up, some just have to make do with an order of magnitude performance increase. But, 100X speed ups, and beyond, have been seen by hundreds of developers. Below are just a few examples that can be found on CUDA Zone, of other developers that have achieved speed ups of more than 100x in their applications.