The question above comes from María (@turbonegra). She follows us @accelereyes. Many of you are wondering when ArrayFire support for new CUDA version 4.1 will be released. The answer: work is currently under way.
CUDA 4.1 includes a new Fermi compiler, and many people in the GPU ecosystem have reported slowdowns from upgrading to the new CUDA version. So we’ve delayed releasing ArrayFire and Jacket support for CUDA 4.1 because we want to verify performance and reliability across all our unit tests, performance regressions, and customer code samples. Our tests sweep across various driver versions and everything from mobile GeForce cards through server-grade Tesla and Fermi chips.
We are still working through the testing and verification at the moment. While NVIDIA’s general claim of 10% performance benefit are a bit fluffy, things do look good overall, and we believe CUDA 4.1 is ready for prime time. Various FFT, BLAS, and LAPACK routines show solid performance enhancements. In the few places where we have observed a performance degradation (e.g. linear texturing), we are working closely with NVIDIA to ensure these are addressed in coming driver and toolkit releases.
We’ll post here and on twitter when CUDA 4.1 support ready in ArrayFire and Jacket. Stay tuned!
PS: Thanks to María for prompting this post 🙂