Intel 

tried to push back at coverage of a recently

published paper that found its Core i7processors couldn't
match the parallel processing performance of an Nvidia
GPU, saying its rival took the findings of the paper out of
context in a blog post that trumpeted the results.
"Nvidia picked up on a small part of the paper and took it
out of context," said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesman, in
an email.
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However, the paper's findings were clear. Titled
"Debunking the 100x GPU vs. CPU myth: An evaluation of
throughput computing on CPU and GPU," the paper was
written by Intel engineers and sought to discredit claims
that GPUs outperform CPUs by a wide margin in parallel
processing applications. Nevertheless, the paper still
found that one of Intel's fastest quad-core desktop
processors, the 3.2GHz Core i7 960, was markedly slower
than an older Nvidia graphics card, the GeForce GTX280,
in benchmark tests conducted by the engineers.
"Our data shows that GTX280 only has an average of
2.5X performance advantage over Core i7 in the 14
kernels tested," the paper said, noting that the Nvidia GPU
was more than 14 times faster under some circumstances.
Nvidia discussed the paper's findings in a blog post that
questioned the magnitude of the GPU performance
advantage described in Intel's paper, providing links to 10
customers who documented performance increases of
100 times or more using software that was optimized to
run on GPUs.
The company also noted Intel researchers didn't publish
the software code and data they used to conduct the
benchmark tests. Without that information, it's impossible
to repeat Intel's tests to confirm the paper's findings or to
understand how the code was optimized for the chips.
"It's just bad science," said Andy Keane, general manager
of GPU computing at Nvidia and the author of the blog
post, discussing the paper in an interview.
Despite their rivalry, Intel and Nvidia readily agree on the
importance of parallel processing capabilities. The only
disagreement between them is whether the CPU or GPU
is the component that's best suited to handling these
parallel processing workloads, an argument largely based
on their respective product strengths.
Intel, which dominates the market for x86 CPUs, believes
that its chips have the necessary power to handle these
workloads, whereas Nvidia -- the world's largest provider
of discrete, or standalone, graphics chips -- thinks using
the GPU is a better choice. Advanced Micro Devices,
which sells both GPUs and x86 CPUs, shares Nvidia's
view that GPUs can offer a significant performance boost
in certain types of applications.
The Intel paper generally reinforces the position held by
Nvidia and AMD by acknowledging that the GTX280 holds
a performance advantage over the Core i7 960 when it
comes to parallel processing.
The reason for the difference in performance
between CPUs and GPUs is that the two chips are
designed with fundamentally different purposes in mind.
CPUs are designed to handle a series of instructions in
sequential order. The addition of multithreading
capabilities and multiple cores gives CPUs a significant
degree of parallelism, but that pales in comparison to what
GPUs from Nvidia and AMD are capable of with certain
applications, such as video encoding.
Originally used to draw thousands of polygons and map
textures for realistic computer graphics, GPUs are parallel
processors designed to handle many operations at the
same time. Each GPU processor core may be simpler and
less powerful than a CPU core but the latest Nvidia GPUs
have hundreds of them, compared to just four cores on the
Core i7 960. The ability to process hundreds of operations
simultaneously is where GPUs get their parallel
processing advantage -- a point that Intel researchers
acknowledged in their paper.
"There is little doubt that today's CPUs would provide the
best single thread performance for throughput computing
workloads. However, the limited number of cores in
today's CPUs limits how many pieces of data can be
processed simultaneously. On the other hand, GPUs
provide many parallel processing units which are ideal for
throughput computing," the paper said.
However, hardware alone isn't enough. Getting the most
performance requires that an application be optimized to
run on a GPU. That can be time-consuming and
expensive. As a result, most applications optimized to run
on GPUs are typically used in financial analysis and other
fields, such as oil exploration and scientific research,
where the benefits from higher performance outweigh the
added cost of optimization.
GPU acceleration capabilities are increasingly a feature of
consumer and business software.
One of the first companies to use the technology was
Apple, which added the ability to use GPUs to handle
some application workloads in the latest release of MacOS
X, called Snow Leopard. Other companies followed suit,
including Adobe, which uses GPU acceleration in
Premiere Pro CS5, After Affects CS5 and Photoshop CS5.
Microsoft included GPU acceleration capabilities
in Windows 7 and is adding the technology to its
upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser.
Smaller software companies are also attracted to GPU
acceleration, like Fotegrafik Labs, a Singaporean startup
that developed software used to search a database of
images or video files.
The image search software was developed on a server
that's powered by a single quad-core Intel Xeon
processor, but Fotegrafik Labs is considering switching to
GPUs because they are more efficient than CPUs for this
type of application and would allow the software to be
used with very large databases, said Ori Cohen, the
company's CEO, citing the relatively low cost of GPUs
compared to the high performance they offer.
"If Intel could provide us with a CPU with hundreds of
cores at a competitive price, then maybe the CPU would
be an alternative to the GPU for video applications,"
Cohen said.

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