AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 Linux Hybrid Driver Promoted To Stable

Two weeks ago AMD released an AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 driver intended for cryptocurrency mining systems while now that v17.40 series driver has been promoted to being their general purpose stable Linux hybrid driver.

The headline feature of the AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 beta was introducing large page support intended to help blockchain compute workloads with OpenCL. Sure enough, AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 is much faster for cryptocurrency mining like Ethereum though we haven't found many performance improvements in other OpenCL compute workloads.

This large page support remains the primary feature being advertised for today's 17.40 stable driver. The release notes also mention there are stability fixes for Indigo Bench, Blender rendering fixes, and a FireRender problem. There aren't any other mentioned new features or other prominent fixes in this AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 update, which is marked as amdgpu-pro-17.40-492261.

The amdgpu-pro-17.40-492261 update only officially supports RHEL/CentOS 7.3, RHEL/CentOS 6.9, Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, and SLED/SLES 12 SP2. There is not yet any support for RHEL 7.4 nor Ubuntu 17.10 (as AMD now focuses their hybrid driver just on Ubuntu LTS releases, but should come indirectly once Ubuntu 16.04.4 support is eventually done).

This latest AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 Linux hybrid driver is available for download from AMD.com.