Gromacs NewsWednesday, 12 September 2007
The GROMACS code is now part of the SPEC 2006 benchmark system for CPUs . That means hardware vendors that want to show off their hardware run GROMACS as a part of their benchmarks and some of them tune hardware and/or compilers to get better results. Look for test 435.gromacs to compare your favorites hardware. Note though, that for the benchmark we were not allowed to use assembly code, so the results you see there are in C-code. As a result the numbers are not representative of true GROMACS performance.
SPEC Site
So it sounds like we will start getting some relative performance numbers from the AMD and Intel camps, as it relates to Gromacs, but now the question is how closely this relates to actual client performance.
For instance, I have seen numbers like this posted, but don't know how well they translate...
435.gromacs, molecular dynamics, lower is better
Dual Opteron 2350 2 GHz (8 cores) Base: 752 s Peak: 607 s
Dual Xeon 5345 2.33 GHz (8 cores) Base: 606 s Peak: 590 s
The base score makes the AMD look ~40% slower, but the peak numbers are much closer. Any help translating this info to common terms?