White Papers

Extreme GPU Computing
Page 10
Figure 9: HPL Power, performance/watt and power consumption compared to CPU-only
Figure 9 shows the power consumption data for the HPL runs. In general, GPUs can consume
substantial power on compute intensive workloads. As shown above, the power consumption of
configurations A, B and C is significantly higher (2.9X to 3.3X), compared to CPU-only runs; this is due
to the four K80 GPUs. Power consumption of D and E is lower (1.8X to 2.0X compared to CPU-only
runs).
The power efficiency, i.e. the useful work delivered for every watt of power consumed, is in the 4+
GFLOPS/W range for quad GPU configurations and about 1.8X to 2X range for dual GPU configurations.
Configuration C offers the highest Performance per watt at about 4.23 GFLOPS/W.
Compared to the CPU-only performance per watt of just 1.5 GFLOPS/w, the quad GPU configurations
show a 2.7X and dual GPU configurations show a 2.3X improvement in the overall performance/watt.
Four K80 Boards
Two K80 Boards