OpenCL: Basemark CL

Basemark CL


Basemark® CL provides a comprehensive OpenCL benchmark that enables an objective comparison of OpenCL implementations with accurate and reliable suite of benchmark tests.

Rightware’s Basemark® CL provides a compelling feature set to coordinate parallel computation across heterogeneous processors utilizing OpenCL. Image manipulation tests run filters on image data and produce the filtered output on the screen. The image manipulation filters are applied to video streams as a separate test, which allows benchmarking of bandwidth limitations from moving data from CPU to GPU, providing a solid real-world case for benchmarking. Physic tests enable leveraging of extra computing power that OpenCL brings into different platforms. The feature tests provided by Basemark® CL enable the testing of performance of single or several features on the hardware.

AMD A8-7600 Kaveri APU Review - HSA Arrives - Processors 12

AMD A8-7600 Kaveri APU Review - HSA Arrives - Processors 13

OpenCL by Khronos Group is the first open, royalty-free standard for parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and embedded devices. Proper use of OpenCL can greatly improve speed and responsiveness of applications in numerous categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. Within these applications, OpenCL makes it possible to leverage the processing power of Central Processing Units (CPUs), Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) and other processing units for general purpose computation. By utilizing an efficient low-level programming interface, OpenCL will form the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middleware and applications.

Basemark® CL features workloads that stress the OpenCL implementation in a realistic way, therefore yielding performance measurement data that is objective and relevant. With the help of OpenCL, it is possible to improve games, applications and user interfaces for instance by including physics-based animations and game-like elements.

OpenCL compute performance is drastically improved in some of our selected tests from Basemark CL, including fluid and wave simulations.  The new Kaveri APU is 34% faster than the 45 watt A10-6700T in the wave test, for example.  Intel's OpenCL integration varies from acceptable to poor in these tests; it does well in the wave simulation but it does incredibly poor in the video noise reduction test, falling 54% behind the 45 watt A8-7600.

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