Running MATLAB’s GPU Bench on an NVIDIA GTX 3070
Just over 4 years ago I was very happy with the 1.2 Teraflops of single precision performance I measured on my then-new Dell XPS 95600 laptop using MATLAB’s GPU Bench and noted that its performance was on-par with the first supercomputer I supported professionally. Double precision performance stank of course but I had gotten used to that with laptop GPUs!
Fast forward to 2021 and my personal computational landscape has changed substantially. The pandemic has confined me to my home office and high performance laptops don’t have quite the same allure that they did when I was doing most of my interesting computational work in airports and coffee shops. I swapped a 15 inch screen for a 49 inch Ultrawide monitor and my laptop is gathering dust while I enjoy my new Dell desktop with an 8 core Intel i7-11700 and an NVIDIA GTX 3070.
This is the first desktop machine I’ve personally owned for almost two decades and the amount of performance I got for less money than the high spec laptops I used to favour is astonishing! Here are the GPU Bench results using MATLAB 2021a
The standout figure is 10,399 Gigaflops for single precision Matrix-Matrix multiplication. At only slightly shy of 10.4 Teraflops that’s almost an order of magnitude faster than the results that impressed me on my laptop 4 years ago!
Double precision performance is nothing to write home about but it never is on consumer NVIDIA GPU cards. I stopped being upset about that years ago!
The other result I find interesting with respect to my personal history of devices is the 622 Gigaflops result for single precision from the Intel i7 CPU. This is getting on for twice as fast as the GPU on my 2015 Apple MacbookPro which managed 349 Gigaflops….a machine I still use today although primarily for Netflix.