Hi,
I'm testing a system equipped with a Fusion A8-3850 and an HD 5870 gpu. I was planning to test the memory access bandwidth in the following cases:
1) The discrete GPU (HD 5870) reads from a buffer allocated in the host memory (CL_MEM_ALLOC_HOST_PTR | CL_MEM_READ_ONLY)
2) The integrated GPU (6550D) reads from a buffer allocated in the host memory (CL_MEM_ALLOC_HOST_PTR | CL_MEM_READ_ONLY)
I was assuming that the result of the first test (discrete gpu) would never be higher than the PCI-express bandwidth (approx 8GB/s), but I'm getting a bandwidth that is around 40 GB/s.
I'm checking the bandwidth by using both the GlobalMemoryTest sample shipped with the AMD SDK and a program written by myself. The results are very similar.
Can you explain me if it is (and why it is) possible to get a cross-domain (gpu->cpu) read bandwidth higher than the PCI one from a discrete GPU?.
Thank you very much!