News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Postgres on the GPU. Parent comment

Re:Postgres on the GPU by duskwuff on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:52PM (#5596274)
AMD's advantage in Bitcoin mining was purely due to an architectural quirk: their shader cores supported bitwise rotation, but Nvidia's didn't. Bitwise rotation is a rare instruction outside of certain crypto algorithms (like SHA256!), so this really means very little for general-purpose performance.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvi...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Postgres on the GPU by mrb on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @03:03PM (#5597245)
"AMD's advantage in Bitcoin mining was purely due to an architectural quirk"

False. I authored a Bitcoin miner utilizing this quirk (bit_align). I was also the first to leverage another instruction exclusive to AMD (bfi_int): https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=2949 bit_align "only" gave AMD a 1.7x advantage over Nvidia. The biggest perf gains (2x-3x!) came from the fact AMD has more execution units: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU... (I also authored this section of the wiki).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Postgres on the GPU by guard-of-terra on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @01:26PM (#5596547)
Scrypt too? Because Nvidia performance on scrypt is bad either.
[ Parent | on HN ]