Ethereum Ethminer Performance With Radeon & GeForce OpenCL - August 2017

[Zan Lynx]

reasonable? GPUs havent had reasonables prices for a long time.

The definition of "reasonable" seems to vary a lot. For a whole lot of people, the GPU included with their Intel i5 or AMD APU is just fine. It plays World of Warcraft, so it's good.

[cj.wijtmans]

my RX 470, which I believe is same market tier as my 7850, was 150 dollars. my 7850 was 150 dollars, my Radeon HD 3850 was 150 dollars, looking up the Radeon 9600 and 9700 which I think would be around that tier too.. well their MSRP was 200 and 400 dollars. So because inflation is a thing too, I feel like you know, they haven't really.

except inflation is not a thing. inflation doesnt double in a few years. That is currently manipulation by central banks like the FR and ECB.

[ratbuddy]

Hi, I tried to add my Ryzen 5 1600/Vega Frontier result to https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...TR-1708090TY75 but the score is really low. I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 with (I think) the latest ROCm kernel. Any ideas?

[bridgman]

We are seeing a big improvement in ROCm performance on Vega when 2MB pages are enabled. At the moment 2M page support is in the all-open staging tree but not yet in ROCm or AMDGPU-PRO (which means it is not available for compute testing yet, unfortunately).

There are some other memory-related improvements in the pipe as well.

[ratbuddy]

Interesting. Does my result seem ballpark-reasonable for a Vega/ROCm result? I was bummed to see it running slower than an RX560 even

[starshipeleven]

I don't think they do really, Gamers Nexus was talking to some AIBs who were worried about miners sending in a lot more RMA cards than normal users and sending them right at the end for made-up reasons, etc. and that causing them problems.

For GPU manufacturers I meant NVIDIA and AMD, not the OEMs.

[starshipeleven]

except inflation is not a thing. inflation doesnt double in a few years. That is currently manipulation by central banks like the FR and ECB.

Yeah, it's definitely the reptilians that infiltrated the banks.

Meanwhile, midrange GPUs prices skyrocketed when mining became a thing. You can still find reasonably priced GPUs a few months from launch if you are lucky, but afterwards the only stuff left is horribly overpriced shit. And I mean like stuff that costs like 80$/€ more than its actual price (adjusted for import fees and that crap, in EU)

[kiaas]

except inflation is not a thing. inflation doesnt double in a few years. That is currently manipulation by central banks like the FR and ECB.

inflation is absolutely real, but true it hasn't doubled unless you go back to the 80s. Prices also haven't doubled, except when counting what is effectively new tiers of GPUs such as the GTX Titans and dual-gpu cards like the 7990, but 500-600 dollar GPUs go back quite a ways(the Hercules card of 1982 had a list price of 499 USD, counting inflation would be about 1.2k in today's money), such as the Radeon 9800 XT apparently was a ~500 dollar(660 in today's money) gpu with a 218mm^2 die, and it was rather high end for the time(while still apparently being a 60W TDP card), and its die size was half of Vega FEs, and a little over half of the 1080 Ti. Keep in mind that nvidia recently had to have special work put in for getting their huge volta dies made because the area (NOT complexity, transistor count, or process-shrink) is larger than ever before, and considering that intel hasn't grown their dies like that, with the first Pentium at 293mm^2, and the i9 7900X measured at 308mm^2 that's saying something about adding a top-tier. Intel is going to be going above the ~300mm^2 dies but they're also going to be charging more than previous Extreme Edition parts for it too, so also seems like a new tier. and to top it off, the 150-200 dollar MSRP GPU market has been 200-~250mm^2 dies for a while now, examples such as the GeForce 9600 GT, 550 Ti, 650 Ti, GTX 960, GTX 1060 3GB, HD 3850, HD 4850, HD 6850, R9 270, R7 370, RX 470, RX 480 4GB. Rebrands, focus-shift, and I think memory shortages? got in the way of some generations lining up with that, and I was only counting launch-prices. things like the HD 7850/7870 got price cuts that would fit them into it, not just their rebrands that fit. edit: ps. I wonder if I should do more research and treat it like a more professional level paper on the matter and take the time to not have it all jumbled up as I found and thought of different details, and cite sources...?

[bridgman]

(EDIT1)can someone tell me how much money it would be needed to bring Clover-OpenCL into a status of supporting ethereum mining?

If it was just for mining, and just for GCN (where the open source compilers are pretty good) probably not that much. Maybe 3-6 months for someone with GPU driver experience already, 2-3x that for someone learning as they go (but at a lower cost).

Of course with today's HW you could go with ROCm & OpenCL, already all open source.

[kiaas]

If it was just for mining, and just for GCN (where the open source compilers are pretty good) probably not that much. Maybe 3-6 months for someone with GPU driver experience already, 2-3x that for someone learning as they go (but at a lower cost).

Of course with today's HW you could go with ROCm & OpenCL, already all open source.

I was under the impression ROCm doesn't work on GCN 1.0 hardware? I think he had mentioned Southern Islands earlier so I think that's why he's interested in Clover. (I myself have a lot of SI hardware, but I have started to liquidate that collection.)
And to anyone that is interested in mining on SI hardware... Ethereum mining requires 3+GB of VRAM these days so a lot of the GCN 1.0 hardware just won't work for eth, so its mostly useful for other algorithms, so HD 79xx and the rebrands are generally the oldest usable for Eth, and an R7 370 4GB is more profitable mining zcash than ethereum, with fglrx or on windows.