When comparing Torch vs CNTK, the Slant community recommends CNTK for most people. In the question“What are the best artificial intelligence frameworks?” CNTK is ranked 5th while Torch is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose CNTK is:
CNTK easily outperforms Theano, TensorFlow, Torch 7, and Caffe with its support of "multi-machine-multi-GPU" backends. Such a setup can be built using Azure's GPU Lab.
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Pros
Pro Easy switch between CPU and GPU
It takes little more than a type cast of your inputs to go from CPU to GPU computation.
Pro Lots of easy to combine modular pieces
Torch is a very modular framework. As such, you can choose which modules you need to implement and which modules to eliminate from your solution.
Pro Performance
CNTK easily outperforms Theano, TensorFlow, Torch 7, and Caffe with its support of "multi-machine-multi-GPU" backends. Such a setup can be built using Azure's GPU Lab.
Cons
Con Not easily accessible to the academic community
Being written in Lua instead of the more widely used Python, it's not as accessible to academics as other solutions which are implemented in Python. With Python being one of the most widely used languages in scientific computing.