Firefly and PC GAMESS-related discussion club

 
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Gena
alchemicylide@gmail.com

>Does anybody have access to system or systems based on AMD Bulldozer
>CPUs? As to us, we do not have them at moment in our zoo. It would be
>nice to test forthcoming Firefly 8.0.0 on these processors and add
>some Bulldozer-specific optimization. We would be grateful if anybody
>could just provide results of our standard benchmarks while remote
>access possibility would be even much more appreciated.

>Thanks!
>Alex Granovsky
>
Dear Alex,

I was thinking about the possibility of upgrading my system from Phenom II X6 to AMD Bulldozer (cause in my case it would only require to purchase CPU, so that wouldn't be too expensive), but since it got so bad reviews and benchmark results in general, I changed my mind. Nevertheless, since it supports AVX instructions, and last benchmark for i7-2600K showed impressive speed improvement due to these instructions, I still wonder if Bulldozer would give the similar performance boost compared to Phenom II (which lacks AVX).
Also, it supports FMA4, and you mentioned you were expecting even better speed-up for FMA, is it worth buying due to these instructions too? I understand it's incompatible with Intel's FMA3, this is why I'm asking.
As far as I understand, one of the main Bulldozer's problems is that it has only four 256-bit FPUs (in 8-module FX-8xxx), so from this point of view it's actually a 4-core processor. What is your opinion about it, how it could reflect its performance in quantum chemistry calculations?
I would be glad to provide the standard benchmarks and to assist you in Firefly optimization by providing remote access if I had it, but I really doubt if I should spend money on it. Frankly, even if I'd get ~20-30% performance improvement, I would not want to buy it.

Kind regards,

Gena

[ This message was edited on Fri Dec 16 '11 at 5:32pm by the author ]