further improved phatk_dia kernel for Phoenix + SDK 2.6 - 2012-01-13

[TurdHurdur]

2011-11-11 i can now report a 0.5-1% increase over the improved phatk kernel

How'd you get this future kernel?

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[hugolp]

Previous patches had solved one of my cards crashing the miner every 30 minutes or so, but this one has reintroduced the problem. One miner mining a 5870 crashed after 20 minutes.

Sorry for that, but I have no idea, what would cause this. Perhaps the card is faulty? Will Furmark "crash" the card or show artifacts?

Dia

Im using the previous patch, that is almost as fast, in that card, so its ok.

Im wondering as well if the card has some kind of problem, but with other kernels it has been running non-stop for days without a problem. Dont know why some kernels trigger the crash.

[Dubs420]

I just tried your latest kernel in GUIminer with poclbm miner went from 417 to 419 each GPU great work thanks. was able to tweak a little more up to 420.6 to 421.0 using -f 1

[Diapolo]

With the ideas that Vince gave to us, I was able to lower the ALU OP usage even further. This means next version will speed up things for 69XX and 58XX again .
Thank you Vince, I didn't need all your changes (some seem to reduce kernel speed, even if they look good), but merged the ones I like and verified everything with KernelAnalyzer.

Edit: Drawback is, that you will need to replace the Phoenix __init__.py file, so it won't be easy usable for non Phoenix users, sorry for that (some init values changed)!

Dia

[teukon]

With the ideas that Vince gave to us, I was able to lower the ALU OP usage even further. This means next version will speed up things for 69XX and 58XX again .
Thank you Vince, I didn't need all your changes (some seem to reduce kernel speed, even if they look good), but merged the ones I like and verified everything with KernelAnalyzer.

Edit: Drawback is, that you will need to replace the Phoenix __init__.py file, so it won't be easy usable for non Phoenix users, sorry for that (some init values changed)!

Dia

You say that some of Vince's changes seem to reduce kernel speed but it looks like actual speed gain/loss is very much card dependent.  That being the case, which cards are you using for testing?

[pandemic]

My 5830 went from 304mh/s to 307mh/s. Small increase, but why not?

[Diapolo]

With the ideas that Vince gave to us, I was able to lower the ALU OP usage even further. This means next version will speed up things for 69XX and 58XX again .
Thank you Vince, I didn't need all your changes (some seem to reduce kernel speed, even if they look good), but merged the ones I like and verified everything with KernelAnalyzer.

Edit: Drawback is, that you will need to replace the Phoenix __init__.py file, so it won't be easy usable for non Phoenix users, sorry for that (some init values changed)!

Dia

You say that some of Vince's changes seem to reduce kernel speed but it looks like actual speed gain/loss is very much card dependent.  That being the case, which cards are you using for testing?

I own a 5870, a 5830 and use AMD KernelAnalyzer to get infos for 69XX cards. You see I focused on that cards during my own tests. I could receive infos for more cards via AMD KA, but it seems hard to optimize one kernel for all cards .

Dia

[kbsbtc]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

[Vince]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

So .. what about some more information? 

Pool? Version used? Clock speeds? 5830 @ 305 seems to be somewhat overclocked ..

[Diapolo]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

Perhaps the kernel pushes your card harder and it generates errors. But could be the pool, driver and so on, like Vince said.

Dia

[jedi95]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

Perhaps the kernel pushes your card harder and it generates errors. But could be the pool, driver and so on, like Vince said.

Dia

Stales have nothing to do with GPU errors in Phoenix. All results returned by the GPU are verified before being sent to the server, which means if the kernel finds invalid shares you will get "Unexpected behavior from OpenCL. Hardware problem?" instead of the share being submitted. If you are not getting any of these errors there is NO WAY a kernel change can affect the number of stale shares. It might affect the total number of shares submitted in a given time period, but every share sent to the server by Phoenix is verified to be H == 0 on the CPU beforehand.

[Diapolo]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

Perhaps the kernel pushes your card harder and it generates errors. But could be the pool, driver and so on, like Vince said.

Dia

Stales have nothing to do with GPU errors in Phoenix. All results returned by the GPU are verified before being sent to the server, which means if the kernel finds invalid shares you will get "Unexpected behavior from OpenCL. Hardware problem?" instead of the share being submitted. If you are not getting any of these errors there is NO WAY a kernel change can affect the number of stale shares. It might affect the total number of shares submitted in a given time period, but every share sent to the server by Phoenix is verified to be H == 0 on the CPU beforehand.

Thanks for clarification! Good to know, this was new for me.

Dia

[talldude]

cool, went from 349 (original improved kernel) to 350.3 with latest. Keep 'em coming

[kbsbtc]

I was getting only .01% stales, with your patch I have an increase of 10mhash on average with my 5830 ( 295->305) but my stale count is now around 3-4%.....

Perhaps the kernel pushes your card harder and it generates errors. But could be the pool, driver and so on, like Vince said.

Dia

Stales have nothing to do with GPU errors in Phoenix. All results returned by the GPU are verified before being sent to the server, which means if the kernel finds invalid shares you will get "Unexpected behavior from OpenCL. Hardware problem?" instead of the share being submitted. If you are not getting any of these errors there is NO WAY a kernel change can affect the number of stale shares. It might affect the total number of shares submitted in a given time period, but every share sent to the server by Phoenix is verified to be H == 0 on the CPU beforehand.

Thanks for clarification! Good to know, this was new for me.

Dia

Thanks for the heads up. I am running 4 5830s on 1 box clocked at 950/300 pointed at bitcoins.lc. It seems the stale count went up for me, didn't mean to blame you or anything just saying that was what happened. I'lll look into on the pool end though.

[dishwara]

=> another addition almost effortless

here the files with these changes:
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1423103594

still some more to come!

Thanks.
It increased 440 to 443 in 5870 @ 975/325 Windows.
431-434 in 6970 & 5870 @ 975/1375 & 984/300 Ubuntu - Smartcoin

With the inclusion of _init_.py, i hope there will be still some room to tweak.

[jedi95]

Stales have nothing to do with GPU errors in Phoenix. All results returned by the GPU are verified before being sent to the server, which means if the kernel finds invalid shares you will get "Unexpected behavior from OpenCL. Hardware problem?" instead of the share being submitted. If you are not getting any of these errors there is NO WAY a kernel change can affect the number of stale shares. It might affect the total number of shares submitted in a given time period, but every share sent to the server by Phoenix is verified to be H == 0 on the CPU beforehand.

Thanks for clarification! Good to know, this was new for me.

Dia

Thanks for the heads up. I am running 4 5830s on 1 box clocked at 950/300 pointed at bitcoins.lc. It seems the stale count went up for me, didn't mean to blame you or anything just saying that was what happened. I'lll look into on the pool end though.

My post was mainly intended to clarify that stale shares are not a good measurement for kernel changes.

A much more reliable test would be to count the total number of shares submitted over a long period (say 24 hours or so) This includes stales, since the goal is to test how many shares the kernel finds, not how many the server accepts. If this number is higher than without the kernel modifications, you know that it's helping.

[BOARBEAR]

With the ideas that Vince gave to us, I was able to lower the ALU OP usage even further. This means next version will speed up things for 69XX and 58XX again .
Thank you Vince, I didn't need all your changes (some seem to reduce kernel speed, even if they look good), but merged the ones I like and verified everything with KernelAnalyzer.

Edit: Drawback is, that you will need to replace the Phoenix __init__.py file, so it won't be easy usable for non Phoenix users, sorry for that (some init values changed)!

Dia

what about for poclbm? there is no __init__.py

[Diapolo]

With the ideas that Vince gave to us, I was able to lower the ALU OP usage even further. This means next version will speed up things for 69XX and 58XX again .
Thank you Vince, I didn't need all your changes (some seem to reduce kernel speed, even if they look good), but merged the ones I like and verified everything with KernelAnalyzer.

Edit: Drawback is, that you will need to replace the Phoenix __init__.py file, so it won't be easy usable for non Phoenix users, sorry for that (some init values changed)!

Dia

what about for poclbm? there is no __init__.py

That's what my edit was about . It's all a matter of how much time I and others have and current focus is on Phoenix, because that's my main miner software.
Perhaps some mods can be done without new init values, so they will work without new __init__.py. But then I have to take care of 2 kernel versions. For now there is no need to worry, new version is not out .

Dia

[hchc]

>I modified the shipping phatk Kernel from Phoenix 1.50. I now get round about 9-10 MHash/s more on my 5830 (up >from 310 to 319/320)!

I would really like to replicate this. Currently getting 310 Mh with 2.1 + 11.5 with bitless Ma() changes. Using the 7-11 I only get a small jump to 311. Can you share the config you use? sdk/driver version etc Thanks.

[Diapolo]

>I modified the shipping phatk Kernel from Phoenix 1.50. I now get round about 9-10 MHash/s more on my 5830 (up >from 310 to 319/320)!

I would really like to replicate this. Currently getting 310 Mh with 2.1 + 11.5 with bitless Ma() changes. Using the 7-11 I only get a small jump to 311. Can you share the config you use? sdk/driver version etc Thanks.

- Win7 X64 SP1
- Cat 11.7 with SDK 2.4 and Runtime 2.4 (in order to be able to use AMD APP KernelAnalyzer)
- Sapphire 5830 Xtreme @ 1000 MHz core / 350 MHz Mem
- Phoenix 1.5: agression 12, vectors, bfi_int

Dia