No ("new") AMD drivers available - Using Mesa?

It seems that a lot of GPU problems revolve around specific versions of drivers. Though AMD has their own support structure, you can often learn from information reported by others who fold.

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Foliant
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 4:39 pm
Location: Bavaria

No ("new") AMD drivers available - Using Mesa?

Post by Foliant »

So i found another piece of Hardware and wanted to try its "performance" before throwing it away.
This GPU is not essential. Im just playing around and would be happy to see it working.

It detects as

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lspci

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos XT [Radeon HD 7470/8470 / R5 235/310 OEM]
Seems like there is no Driver support from AMD since 2015, so i tried Mesa.

Short Question: Is it posible to fold with Mesa?
The shortest answer I can find is no: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=34735&p=329177&hilit=Mesa#p329207

If there is a long Answer, here are more informations:

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clinfo

Platform Name                                   Clover
Number of devices                                 1
  Device Name                                     AMD CAICOS (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.3.0-53-generic, LLVM 10.0.0)
  Device Vendor                                   AMD
  Device Vendor ID                                0x1002
  Device Version                                  OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 20.2.0-devel (git-4e147e2 2020-05-23 bionic-oibaf-ppa)
  Driver Version                                  20.2.0-devel
  Device OpenCL C Version                         OpenCL C 1.1 
  Device Type                                     GPU
  Device Profile                                  FULL_PROFILE
  Device Available                                Yes
  Compiler Available                              Yes
  Max compute units                               2
  Max clock frequency                             775MHz
  Max work item dimensions                        3
  Max work item sizes                             256x256x256
  Max work group size                             256
  Preferred work group size multiple              64
  Preferred / native vector sizes                 
    char                                                16 / 16      
    short                                                8 / 8       
    int                                                  4 / 4       
    long                                                 2 / 2       
    half                                                 0 / 0        (n/a)
    float                                                4 / 4       
    double                                               0 / 0        (n/a)
  Half-precision Floating-point support           (n/a)
  Single-precision Floating-point support         (core)
    Denormals                                     No
    Infinity and NANs                             Yes
    Round to nearest                              Yes
    Round to zero                                 No
    Round to infinity                             No
    IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add               No
    Support is emulated in software               No
    Correctly-rounded divide and sqrt operations  No
  Double-precision Floating-point support         (n/a)
  Address bits                                    32, Little-Endian
  Global memory size                              1073741824 (1024MiB)
  Error Correction support                        No
  Max memory allocation                           751619276 (716.8MiB)
  Unified memory for Host and Device              No
  Minimum alignment for any data type             128 bytes
  Alignment of base address                       32768 bits (4096 bytes)
  Global Memory cache type                        None
  Image support                                   No
  Local memory type                               Local
  Local memory size                               32768 (32KiB)
  Max number of constant args                     15
  Max constant buffer size                        751619276 (716.8MiB)
  Max size of kernel argument                     1024
  Queue properties                                
    Out-of-order execution                        No
    Profiling                                     Yes
  Profiling timer resolution                      0ns
  Execution capabilities                          
    Run OpenCL kernels                            Yes
    Run native kernels                            No
  Device Extensions                               cl_khr_byte_addressable_store cl_khr_global_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_global_int32_extended_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_base_atomics cl_khr_local_int32_extended_atomics
And

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22:18:14:Adding folding slot 02: READY gpu:1:Caicos [Radeon R5 235/HD 8470]
[...]
22:42:42:WU01:FS02:Starting
22:42:42:ERROR:WU01:FS02:Failed to start core: OpenCL device matching slot 2 not found, make sure the OpenCL driver is installed or try setting 'opencl-index' manually
This GPU is not essential. Im just playing around and would be happy to see it working.

Regards,
Patrick
24/7
1x i5 3470 @2Cores
1x GTX750 (GM107)
2x GTX750Ti (GM107)
Joe_H
Site Admin
Posts: 7856
Joined: Tue Apr 21, 2009 4:41 pm
Hardware configuration: Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp4
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp2
Location: W. MA

Re: No ("new") AMD drivers available - Using Mesa?

Post by Joe_H »

Currently there are no projects running that could use this card. As best as I can find, the card does not support Double Precision (FP64) calculations and all current projects require mixed precision. That is mostly Single (FP32) with some DP used where needed to maintain accuracy.
Image

iMac 2.8 i7 12 GB smp8, Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp6
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp3
Foliant
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 4:39 pm
Location: Bavaria

Re: No ("new") AMD drivers available - Using Mesa?

Post by Foliant »

Thanks for the reply.

Im getting WU from the servers and can find a "1:5" in the GPUs.txt.

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0x1002:0x6778:1:5:Caicos [Radeon R5 235/HD 8470]
WUs simply dont start so i was thinking it might be a driver issue.
But as I said earlier, this GPU isnt essential. It gets a nice place on some auction site.

Regards,
Patrick
24/7
1x i5 3470 @2Cores
1x GTX750 (GM107)
2x GTX750Ti (GM107)
Joe_H
Site Admin
Posts: 7856
Joined: Tue Apr 21, 2009 4:41 pm
Hardware configuration: Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp4
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp2
Location: W. MA

Re: No ("new") AMD drivers available - Using Mesa?

Post by Joe_H »

Okay, that appears that AMD card was missed in the updating to reflect whether or not a card was capable of Double Precision calculations. As best as I have been able to find out, the only Terascale 2 based cards that could handle DP were the HD 5800 series plus the HD 5970 which was basically two 5870 GPUs on a single card.

The other issue with this older cards, especially on Linux, is that AMD dropped OpenCL support in the driver packages before the final releases of video drivers that support the cards. I even came across a few reports that for some of these cards the last version with OpenCL support gave erroneous results for OpenCL programs, they had to go back to the previous release.

For Linux the AMD driver support for these older cards was ended before it was on Windows, so the card may be easier to set up on Windows. The mesa open source drivers work for video, but as far as I know have never worked for OpenCL and the F@h GPU core. The ROCm open source drivers have been reported to be able to do this, but don't support the older cards.

I will pass on the information about the GPUs.txt entry, and another Caicos related one I noticed when looking up this one.
Image

iMac 2.8 i7 12 GB smp8, Mac Pro 2.8 quad 12 GB smp6
MacBook Pro 2.9 i7 8 GB smp3
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