Intel Says GPUs Are Only 14x Faster Than CPUs

When NVIDIA pulled CUDA out of the shadows and turned the GPU into a parallel processor that was capable of running software not just accelerating 3D graphics the war between the GPU and CPU makers started in earnest. NVIDIA started to cite developers claiming they saw 100x improvements in performance on some apps compared to the apps run on a CPU.

That performance increase makes sense when you consider that the average CPU has six cores at the most while a GPU like the older GTX 280 from NVIDIA has 240 processing cores. NVIDIA reports that Intel presented a paper at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in France titled "Debunking the 100x GPU vs. CPU Myth."

Intel found in the paper that the GPU was only 14x faster on the set of unknown benchmarks than the CPU. NVIDIA claims that the benchmarks used by Intel weren't specified in the paper. It strikes me as more than a little odd that Intel would provides proof conducted on its own that the GPU was still many times faster than its CPUs.