I'm running BOINC for a years, and SETI@home classic since 2003.

Few fays ago, I've started my first project that support ATI GPU calculations. It's Collatz Conjecture.

I use BOINC Manager 6.10.18 (just upgraded from 6.10.17) on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

For years of computing I've got about ~40.000 work done for SETI and ~35.000 for Climatepredicion.net. But for only few days of running Collatz Conjecture on my ATI GPU, I got ~50.000 work done for Collatz Conjecture.





I know that my ATI 3850 has

Over 1 teraFLOPS of Compute Power – up to 640 stream processors (320 x 2) on a single card deliver the raw horsepower to attack the most demanding graphics applications

And CPU (Intel DualCore D930 @ 2x3GHz) benchmarks says:
1323 MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
3928 MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
but I can not believe that GPU computed more work for few days then CPU for few years(?!)

Is it possible or it's maybe some computation bug in Collatz Conjecture?
I've checked some random macnihes with CUDA support on the net and they also have so much work done per WU/job.

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BRANKKO
BOINC@Serbia
www.plagosus.net

I know that my ATI 3850 has

Over 1 teraFLOPS of Compute Power – up to 640 stream processors (320 x 2) on a single card deliver the raw horsepower to attack the most demanding graphics applications

I hate to burst your bubble, but the HD3850 only has 320 stream processors and a peak of 427GFlops. Better check this wiki page.

Even if you have the 3850x2 (which has two GPUs and 2x320 stream processors) it'll do 855GFlops at max.

Is it possible or it's maybe some computation bug in Collatz Conjecture?

No, they decide how much credit you get per given task. Better check their forums, or this thread on that.

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I know that my ATI 3850 has

Over 1 teraFLOPS of Compute Power – up to 640 stream processors (320 x 2) on a single card deliver the raw horsepower to attack the most demanding graphics applications

I hate to burst your bubble, but the HD3850 only has 320 stream processors and a peak of 427GFlops. Better check this wiki page.

Even if you have the 3850x2 (which has two GPUs and 2x320 stream processors) it'll do 855GFlops at max.

It was suspicious to me too, but BOINC Manager reports

ATI GPU 0: ATI Radeon HD 3800 (RV670) (CAL version 1.4.427, 256MB, 442 GFLOPS peak)

And it's still pretty nice :)

Anyway, it just looks like that two GPU's are better then two CPU's O_o

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BRANKKO
BOINC@Serbia
www.plagosus.net

Any work thrown at a GPU is attacked by all the stream or shader processors that the GPU has, it's doing all that work in parallel; compared to CPUs that do the work in sequence. That's where the speed-up comes from.

However, since GPUs are only just on the market (compared to how long CPUs have been around), they're not as reliable yet as CPUs are. Expect degradation (break-downs, lesser performance in games) when running work 24/7 on the GPU.

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I know that my ATI 3850 has

Over 1 teraFLOPS of Compute Power – up to 640 stream processors (320 x 2) on a single card deliver the raw horsepower to attack the most demanding graphics applications

I hate to burst your bubble, but the HD3850 only has 320 stream processors and a peak of 427GFlops. Better check this wiki page.

Even if you have the 3850x2 (which has two GPUs and 2x320 stream processors) it'll do 855GFlops at max.

It was suspicious to me too, but BOINC Manager reports

ATI GPU 0: ATI Radeon HD 3800 (RV670) (CAL version 1.4.427, 256MB, 442 GFLOPS peak)

And it's still pretty nice :)

Anyway, it just looks like that two GPU's are better then two CPU's O_o

My 3850 in my old Prescott P4 3.0GHz with HT on, got me a RAC of 25000 to 28000 on Milkyway and currently looks as though it'll get ~21000 on Collatz. CPU only crunching gets me ~800 using the optimised SETI ap.

Yeah baby!