Hardware GPU Mux?

[aman-tiwari]

Hey, I'm considering getting an Aero 15X and would basically have this exact configuration. I'm wondering if it has a Hardware GPU Mux? Such that in the BIOS one could turn off the iGPU and instead use the regular GPU directly? Or is that not possible at all and everything has to go through bumblebee. I was also wondering if bumblebee affects cuda performance, or just opengl/visual output performance?

[cleemesser]

I am not sure how this mux is set up. I have the 2017 (i7-7700HQ) model and the BIOS only gives the option to enable/disable GPU acceleration from what I can see. bumblebee does not seem to affect cuda performance as there is no transport across rendering to display like with virtualgl or primus. I usually just turn on the GPU "manually" (see my cuda-on/cuda-off scripts) but I think you can specify optirun to run cuda things: just set the bridge to none and specify the correct libraries.

Something like optirun -b none -l $CUDA_LIBRARIES probably does it.

[cleemesser]

I usually run relatively short things on my laptop -- I just want to be able to test things as they will run on servers, and the cuda performanc seems good for this.

For example the mnist example at https://github.com/pytorch/examples/tree/master/mnist runs through 60000 images in about 5 seconds and the whole main.py trains to 98% accuracy in 46s

I will look at something more involved and give it a try. -C

[aman-tiwari]

I'm not sure if it has a mux, some laptops do. Thank you doing the tests! These benchmarks could be good to run if you're interested: https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks