GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands On AMDGPU Takes Another Step Forward

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands On AMDGPU Takes Another Step Forward

Many Phoronix readers appear excited about the forthcoming GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" support for the AMDGPU DRM driver as an alternative to the Radeon DRM. With the newer AMDGPU DRM support will eventually mean Vulkan and AMDGPU-PRO support for these original Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs. This GCN 1.0 / SI support has taken another step forward with now having "workable" dynamic power management...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-SI-DPM

[Pontostroy]

very good news, amdgpu on SI works fine(3d and 2d, opencl) except dpm

[fhuberts]

My experience is that everybody roots for AMD but buys Intel and nVidia. The new 480 is inferior to 1080 and the high end gpu will also be inferior. AMD Zen will be slower than my 2013 haswell mark my words.

What kind of nonsense argument is this?

If you like AMD then you should buy its products.
What difference does it make if it is a small amount slower? (if it even is)
Want to support them? Then buy their products and not those of their competitor.
Not buying their stuff will result in their stuff not being around anymore.
Moral support does not work in this world, vote through your wallet.

[theghost]

My experience is that everybody roots for AMD but buys Intel and nVidia. The new 480 is inferior to 1080 and the high end gpu will also be inferior. AMD Zen will be slower than my 2013 haswell mark my words.

Nice troll post.
The 480 was never meant to be equal or better than the 1080.
We will see what time brings, when AMD delivers.
To my mind, even if AMD's performance is a bit worse than Intel's/Nvidia's, there are other parameters (OOB support, $/watt perf. etc.) that are much more interesting than simply running the 'best'.

[grigi]

The reason to want the amdgpu support for SI, for me, has nothing to do with AMDGPU-PRO, but with the more optimal fences implementation, and better memory management.
That 5% perf increase across the board, and eventually support for freesync and other new features.

[Namenlos]

[…]eventually support for freesync and other new features.

There is no freesync on GCN 1.0 afaik.

[grigi]

The display in my notebook is eDP, and technically it already supports changing between 40/60Hz transparently for power management in windows. I know an that early demo of freesync was done on just such a display, but never implemented formally. Since this is open source, we will see how much of freesync is actually workable. :-) even if I just get the option to drop refresh rate to 40Hz for power savings I'll consider it a big win.
Regardless, there is many many many reasons to look forward to AMDGPU on SI.
e.g. radeon doesn't support firmware version reporting, so some features have just been turned off in favour of safety. with amdgpu, you can get those features back as long as you are running a new enough firmware version.

[starshipeleven]

The new 480 is inferior to 1080 and the high end gpu will also be inferior.

A 250$ card is worse than a 500$ card, THEREFORE the 500$ card of the same brand will also be inferior. Yeah it makes sense.

AMD Zen will be slower than my 2013 haswell mark my words.

Yeah, low-end Zen will probably be worse than your high-end 2013 Intel processor, don't worry.

[frosth]

building...let's see what happens. I hope don't need new firmware.

@Master5000
yes, 480 is worse than 1080, so what? it's worse about 600..cheers, mate!

[Meteorhead]

Could someone make a bullet list of what to do if I want to have OpenCL 1.2 on HD7970 with AMDGPU on an Ubuntu Server 16.04 with no displays attached?