Ethereum & OpenCL: ROCm vs. AMDGPU-PRO 17.40

First up is the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining benchmark with Ethminer.

The Radeon RX Vega 56/64 performance is basically the same as expected for AMDGPU-PRO/ROCm. The Radeon R9 Fury is a little bit slower with the latest ROCm packages while the RX 560 and RX 580 Polaris graphics cards are much slower on the latest ROCm packages.

Across all tested graphics cards, LuxMark with the hotel scene was much slower using the upstream ROCm packages over AMDGPU-PRO 17.40.

But in the LuxMark Luxball HDR scene, the performance was similar on the five tested graphics cards.

LuxMark's microphone scene meanwhile would crash with the latest ROCm packages after spending several minutes attempting to compile the OpenCL kernels. The Folding@HOME FAHBench was another OpenCL benchmark failing to run with these upstream ROCm packages.

Those wanting to try Radeon Open Compute's ROCm packages can find all the details via GitHub. Unfortunately, the ROCm user-space components do not yet run on an upstream Linux kernel due to some of the KFD changes for discrete GPUs not yet being merged, but maybe we will finally see that happen for Linux 4.16. If you want to see how the AMD performance is comparing to NVIDIA, see the aforementioned latest GeForce vs. Radeon OpenCL Linux comparison.