Page 1 of 1

Client statistics question

Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 10:22 pm
by 3D_Now!!
Happy New Year all.

My question regards the statistics by client OS.

Overall we seem to have a lot of flops at the moment (16,117,000,000,000 at the time of writing) and the majority of these appear to be coming from "Nvidia Fermi GPU".
With only 70 TFLOPS apparently coming from ATI GPU's.
Does the category Nvidia Fermi GPU refer to the whole of the GPU core 17 with just an out of date name? Therefore including all the AMD GPU's also.
Because I don't believe there are only 230 AMD GPU's contributing versus 23000 Nvidia ones.
Is it time for a new split to make it clearer what is contributing what? Is that even possible?

Re: Client statistics question

Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 11:26 pm
by 7im
The significant ATI drop off is unexplained up to this point. Could be due to the attraction of Bitcoin mining, or the fact that core 16 for ATI recently went end of life, and the clients are having trouble getting core_17 work units.

The AMD numbers seem correct. The NVIDIA GPU number is all the G80s through 2xx series cards, running core_15. The Fermi number is all the Fermi and Kepler cards, running either core_15 or core_17. Core _17 is likely the reason that number is so high.

Re: Client statistics question

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 6:47 pm
by abraidwood
I think there's a lot of litecoin mining happening on AMD GPUs at the moment, but was also very surprised when I checked the client stats page. Are there any historical values around to see changes over time?

Re: Client statistics question

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 7:26 pm
by 7im
Yes. The nose dive in ATI looks to be about mid November 2013.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... ring#gid=5

Re: Client statistics question

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 7:37 pm
by VijayPande
We'll take a look. This could likely be a new WS + core17 stats reporting issue. My guess is that w/Core17 we'd be getting a lot more AMD GPUs, with their better performance.

Re: Client statistics question

Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 10:36 pm
by 3D_Now!!
Thanks for your responses!

I'm not an expert on bit coin but I thought that the more people that were mining them then the harder they became to produce. And with the introduction of dedicated ASICs, GPU's were no longer an economical option. Add to that the probability that most people who fold do so through an altruistic motive, so to move to the only very slightly lucrative exercise of bit coin mining seems unlikely to me (EDIT: I've just looked up litecoin, looks like ASICs hold less of an advantage here, but surely this wouldn't have such a magnetic effect on f@h donors?)
Also, as Vijay said, it would make more logical sense for more AMD contributors to come on board (no pun intended), myself included, I chose AMD in my recent build due to the much improved performance with core_17.
So with core_16 being EOL and core_17 coming out of adv-methods, it would seem the most likely explanation to me that AMD GPU's were being "swallowed up" by the Fermi category.

Given the huge majority of the computing power that comes from GPUs, it would be most interesting to see what the split is, and I'm excited to see more developments coming in this area. Keep the updates coming, 2014 will be a good year for f@h it looks like!

Many thanks for your time.