Ethereum & OpenCL: ROCm vs. AMDGPU-PRO 17.40

Following this week's Ethereum and OpenCL benchmarks with Radeon vs. NVIDIA using the latest Linux drivers, some premium supporters requested a fresh AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm comparison. So here are a couple of those OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm on different Polaris / Fiji and Vega GPUs.

With AMDGPU-PRO for the Radeon Vega graphics processors, the ROCm-based driver stack is what's used rather than their older OpenCL driver. So with the RX Vega 56 and 64 (and Vega Frontier Edition), there isn't much of a AMDGPU-PRO vs. ROCm comparison besides the upstream ROCm code being a bit newer than what's currently in AMDGPU-PRO. With AMDGPU-PRO 17.40, the default OpenCL stack isn't yet ROCm but their older OpenCL driver.

AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 beta was used for testing and then the ROCm packages as made available by AMD as of this week in their Ubuntu 16.04 package archive. With the latest ROCm packages for Ubuntu 16.04, they are using a Linux 4.11-based kernel for their KFD module, etc. The OpenCL driver is exposed as OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP 2508.0 compared to AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 exposing AMD-APP 2482.3. Tests were done off Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS.

While OpenCL is the version reported, clinfo is also now reporting with ROCm that it's supporting some of OpenCL 2.1 as well. A couple tests were then run via the Phoronix Test Suite.