New AMDGPU Details & Looking Forward To Major Radeon Linux Improvements In 2016

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New AMDGPU Details & Looking Forward To Major Radeon Linux Improvements In 2016

Friday afternoon I had a call with a few AMD representatives talking about their Linux driver plans for 2016. Here's the details for those wondering about AMDGPU, Vulkan, GPUOpen, and more.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22660

[Veto]

Good with some Linux-related communication from AMD - besides the excellent forum comments from Bridgman et al.

Regarding community feed-back, I personally don't care too much about the closed source driver. The open-source driver is now good enough for the older cards and rapidly evolving. I am using the closed-source driver right now though for my new Tonga card until a better out of the box experience with AMDGPU is available. I hope Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will have AMDGPU enabled and I will ditch fglrx again.

Hopefully the initially closed source Vulkan driver will not be tied up to the fglrx driver and can co-exist with the open source driver somehow?

[kilobug]

Thanks for all those infos.

Did they say anything about Linux support for the upcoming Polaris architecture ? If we can hope for a quick (at release or during the next few weeks) "real" support in AMDGPU (with reclocking, ...), or if we'll have to wait or months ?

It's a bit of an interested question, since I was planning to buy a GCN 1.2 card somewhen in Q2 2016, but now I'm wondering if I shouldn't wait for a Polaris one...

[haagch]

On the topic of compute, I asked about the state of open-source OpenCL with it still being OpenCL 1.2 era with Clover Gallium3D

*OpenCL 1.1. They still don't have all the requirements for running http://www.mandelbulber.com/

What about intel+amd Enduro? Their support is still terrible in the proprietary driver. Also, still no dri3 synchronization with intel. Sure, that's more intel's fault, but after all AMD and intel have cooperated to sell this hardware, so they should both be held responsible for its support.

[haagch]

On the topic of compute, I asked about the state of open-source OpenCL with it still being OpenCL 1.2 era with Clover Gallium3D

*OpenCL 1.1. They still don't have all the requirements for running http://www.mandelbulber.com/

Also, what about intel+amd powerxpress/enduro? Support with catalyst is still terrible (needs X restart or separate X to switch), and with the open source drivers there's still no dri3 synchronization. Sure, that's more intel's fault, but after all amd and intel have cooperated on creating and selling this hardware, so they should both be held responsible for its performance.

[smitty3268]

On the topic of compute, I asked about the state of open-source OpenCL with it still being OpenCL 1.2 era with Clover Gallium3D, not as good as the proprietary drivers supporting OpenCL, etc. They'll continue to advance their OpenCL stack but didn't have anything to talk about with any announcements for suddenly getting their OpenCL stack into the best shape possible.

I believe they've already said they will be open sourcing their existing proprietary OpenCL code at some point - probably after the Vulkan code gets opensourced, i would guess. Sounds like it isn't going to happen until at least the end of 2016, though, judging by what they said here.

[Kano]

It would be very unlogical to drop support of older SI cards as AMDGPU was tested first with em. What looks really bad right now seems to be HBM related. I don't expect high performance with Fiji and Polaris until Fiji beats current GDDR5 cards with the full oss stack. AMD sells Fiji at high price and the chip performs very poor/$ on Linux.

[whitecat]

What about LIBGLVND ? Did they plan to integrate/use it it with Radeon Software ?

[sabun]

There is the experimental AMDGPU config option for pre-GCN1.2 support, but that's not currently enabled by default. When bringing up this whole issue then of what Radeon hardware would actively be supported, it sounds like it will largely depend upon the community feedback and other matters.

Looks like my previous voiced concerns are true then. It's better to sell the R9 390 I have now before the price drops, and instead buy a Polaris since proprietary support is more likely to cease for it even though it's not even a year old yet.

The RadeonSI support for this card is not there yet, and I highly doubt the performance will change in 2016 since they're moving fullspeed with AMDGPU. Not to mention, no Vulkan support without the proprietary driver.

[thalaric]

Overall, the Radeon Linux space is looking bright for 2016 if they can deliver on their promises.

I guess for some of us all we have to look forward to is their promise to drop our year old cards into maintenance mode.