woelen
Super Administrator
Posts: 8012
Registered: 20-8-2005
Location: Netherlands
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Mood: interested
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Anyone here with a working AMD Radeon PRO VII?
I purchased a used AMD Radeon PRO VII video adapter from eBay, for just appr. EUR 500 (normal price is between EUR 1500 and EUR 2000). I chose this
one, because of its fantastic FP64 performance (appr. 6.5 TFLOPS).
I received the card, and it works fine. The card, however, is flashed with a VBIOS image from a Radeon VII (the non-pro edition). This has the
advantage that it can be undervolted, overclocked, etc.
These performance-tweaking features are nice, but unfortunately, the card loses half its FP64 performance. The non-pro card (AMD Radeon VII) has half
of its FP64 units laser cut, and its VBIOS assumes that only half of them are available. So, my card only has 3.3 TFLOPS max. FP64 performance. For
me, the FP64 performance is much more important than the possibility to tweak the performance of the card.
I have searched the internet for a VBIOS image of the Radeon PRO VII (so, not the Radeon VII). I only found one image, but the website says it is
unverified: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/229229/229229
I am very reluctant to flash the VBIOS with this image. A wrong VBIOS in a video card may brick it. I read numerous horror stories of people, who
flashed their video cards and after that, the PC would not even POST if the card is in the motherboard (even not when another working video adapter is
used and connected to the monitor). They effectively bricked their video adapter. I don't want to take that risk.
If you have a working Radeon PRO VII then it would be very nice if you could dump the VBIOS image of the card and upload it here. Dumping the VBIOS
image can easily be done with a tool like GPU-Z: https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/
It also is possible to dump images on Linux (e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04). See this thread: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/613910/dump-vga-bio...
The file for a Radeon PRO VII has a size of 512 kbyte.
Even if I do not flash it, I still have 3.3 TFLOPS performance, which is well over 10 times the FP64 performance of a decent NVidia video adapter.
NVidia's video adapters for the consumer market have great FP32 performance, but terrible FP64 performance (e.g. my RTX 3060 has 13 TFLOPS FP32
performance, but only 0.2 TFLOPS FP64 performance). This is a general pattern, cards usually only has 1 : 32 FP64 performance, or even 1 : 64. The
Radeon PRO VII is much better, it has 1 :2 FP64 performance. The Radeon VII has 1 :4 FP64 performance.
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Tsjerk
International Hazard
Posts: 3032
Registered: 20-4-2005
Location: Netherlands
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Mood: Mood
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Sorry, can't help you. But you make me wonder; what are you calculating?
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woelen
Super Administrator
Posts: 8012
Registered: 20-8-2005
Location: Netherlands
Member Is Offline
Mood: interested
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I'm doing mathematical research on solving polynomial and semi-polynomial equations and about the distribution of roots of such equations. Doing
statistical analysis requires solving billions or even trillions of such equations and that takes time. The solving of such equations, however, can be
parallellized very well. I use the video adapter for doing the arithmetic in parallel. The AMD card has almost 4000 stream processors and the load can
be distributed over them. My NVidia card has more than 3500 CUDA cores, allowing me to distribute the load over them. Unfortunately, it only has 56
FP64-capable cores, while having more than 3500 cores for FP32 arithmetic and INT32 arithmetic. That's why I bought the AMD card. It has almost 2000
FP64-capable stream processors, each of them capable of running two FP64 instructions per clock cycle at 1700 MHz.
Memory bandwidth also is amazing for this card. It has a bandwidth of 1000 GByte (not bits but bytes!) per second. The non-pro card also has that
memory bandwidth, but it only has half the number of FP64-capable stream processors.
I will add a few webpages to my website soon about my mathematical experiments and also make available some software for solving polynomial equations
in C or Java. At the moment I am very busy with helping our son with preparation for exams, but these are almost over and then I hope to have more
time for experimenting again.
[Edited on 21-5-23 by woelen]
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