AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 Emerges With Vega, ROCm Compute Support

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 27 June 2017 at 12:00 PM EDT. 42 Comments
AMD
Thanks to today's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD has released an updated AMDGPU-PRO Linux hybrid driver.

AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 is the new series introduced for Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, which finally appears to be a measurable update over the previous 17.10 series. Besides Vega Frontier support, the 17.20 -PRO driver has now bundled the ROCm OpenCL compute component into this hybrid driver as a replacement to its older OpenCL driver.

The release notes mention, "Ubuntu 16.04.2 and RHEL 7.3/CentOS 7.3 installations incorporate the ROCm component that can be optionally installed for running Compute/OpenCL applications – any other version of ROCm is not currently supported." But it isn't clear that this ROCm component is the new ROCm release, which AMD has said will be released on 29 June.

Vega and the ROCm integration are the only mentioned changes for the 17.20 series. At least though the Vega support supplies an updated DC display stack for this driver's DKMS module.

To much disappointment, the AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 driver still doesn't appear to support the months-old Ubuntu 17.04... Ubuntu 16.04.2 is listed as supported along with RHEL/CentOS 7.3, RHEL/CentOS 6.9, and SLED/SLES 12 SP2. Thus this 17.20 driver probably won't work yet on newer Linux kernels / X.Org Servers if it doesn't even have 17.04 support yet.

Those wanting to try out the AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 driver for other hardware can find it via the Frontier page. I'll be running some benchmarks shortly (on non-Vega GPUs) to see if 17.20 happens to bring any OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan performance changes.
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