Firefly and PC GAMESS-related discussion club

 
Learn how to ask questions correctly  
 
 

 

Alex Granovsky
gran@classic.chem.msu.su

From what I know of this micro-architecture and the results of some
published benchmarks, I'm afraid you are absolutely right in your
doubts. The good news is that I hope to get access to this hardware
very soon (thanks to one of Firefly users!) and will publish results
of our standard benchmarks on our server. Probably, they will be
of some interest to you.

All the best,
Alex

>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