PCI express pinned Host Memory

Retesting my benchmarks with the current release of Cuda 2.3 I finally incorporated new features like pinned host memory allocation. Specs say that this improves the host to device transfers and vice versa.
Due to the special allocation the arrays will stay at the same location in memory , will not be swapped and are faster available for DMA transfers. In the other case, most data is first copied to a pinned memory buffer and then to the ordinarily allocated memory space. This detour is omitted in this case here.

The performance plot shows, that pinned memory now offers a performance of up to 5.9 GB/s on the fastest currently available PCIe X16 Gen 2 Interface which has a peak transfer rate of 8 GB/s. This corresponds to 73% of Peak performance with almost no optimization applied. In contrast, optimization such as a blocked data transfer, which prooved to increase performance some time ago [PCIe revisited] have no positive effect on performance anymore.

Using only the blocked optimzations without pinned memory still is better then doing an unblocked transfer from unpinned memory, but it only transfers about 4.5 GB/s which corresponds to 56 % of peak to the device.
Reading from the device is far worst with only 2.3 GB/s.