Ethereum Ethminer Performance With Radeon & GeForce OpenCL - August 2017

[bridgman]

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.)

Q was asking about Clover (in Mesa), not ROCm AFAIK. The compiler goes back to SI (we use it in radeonsi as well), it's just the ROCm runtime that is built around the dedicated compute block (MEC) in CI and up plus a couple of recent features like PCIE atomics.

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.

True, good point.

[bridgman]

I know that ethereum need a 4GB vram gpu. This means 4gb edition of 290 or the 8gb 295X2 is the minimum.
but it is still GCN1.0 hardware.

If it helps, the 290 is actually GCN1.1 / CI / gfx7 and has a working MEC block. It's a bit limited in the sense that it only has one MEC block (Kaveri has two) and the microcode store is fixed-size so it can't run the HW scheduler under ROCm, but for things like mining I don't think you would want HWS anyways.

(for those interested in the details on Kaveri we run HWS on one MEC block and compute on the other)

[chfast]

Hi there,

I started maintaining ethminer some time ago. OpenCL should not be much different, but at least you should have access to binaries for main operating systems.

https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer

[DJViking]

How come NVIDIA GTX 1070 is better than the 1080?

[Michael]

How come NVIDIA GTX 1070 is better than the 1080?

Due to its memory characteristics as already explained.