Performance per What?

By Tomas Akenine-Möller, Björn Johnsson
Intel Corporation, Lund University

In this short note, we argue that performance per watt, which is often cited in the graphics hardware industry, is not a particularly useful unit for power efficiency in scientific and engineering discussions. We argue that joules per task and watts are more reasonable units. We show a concrete example where nanojoules per pixel is much more intuitive, easier to compute aggregate statistics from, and easier to reason about.

Read the preprint paper: Performance per What? [PDF 240KB]

Citation: Akenine-Möller and Johnsson, Performance per What?, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), vol. 1, no. 1, 37-41, 18 Oct. 2012.

Available onlinehttp://jcgt.org/published/0001/01/03/