AMD teams up with SiSoft on OpenCL benchmark

Chip firm AMD said it is collaborating to develop benchmark testing suites for OpenCL with SiSoftware.

The OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite forms part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010. AMD believes it is the only company that can provide a complete OpenCL development platform for GPGPUs – essentially a combination of graphics chip and microprocessor.

AMD said that developers, independent software vendors and original equipment manufacturers want to measure OpenCL system performance.

The SiSoftware benchmark suite is the first step in giving the industry a set of tools, said AMD.

But here’s the rub. AMD said that while it has optimized the performance of the OpenCL benchmarks for its graphics chips, it said that results using the ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card is 2.7 times faster than Nvidia’s CUDA running on the GeForce GTX 295 with two graphics chips.

AMD’s ATI card only uses one graphics chip.