AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 vs. ROCm 2.0 OpenCL Performance

When recently publishing the PlaidML deep learning benchmarks and lczero chess neural network OpenCL tests, some Phoronix readers mentioned they were seeing vastly different results with using the PAL OpenCL driver in AMDGPU-PRO (Radeon Software) compared to using the ROCm compute stack. So for seeing how those two separate AMD OpenCL drivers compare, here are some benchmark results with a Vega GPU while testing ROCm 2.0 and AMDGPU-PRO 18.50.

The Radeon Software AMDGPU-PRO 18.50 PAL OpenCL driver was benchmarks followed by various tests while using the ROCm 2.0 OpenCL compute driver. ROCm 2.0 is ultimately more full-featured than the former OpenCL driver code but there is quite a large difference in performance depending upon the workload, both for better and worse.

Tests were done with a Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX box running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the stock Linux 4.15 kernel. The OpenCL GPU benchmarking was carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.