Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: limits of ZEC mining
by
nerdralph
on 15/11/2016, 17:18:49 UTC
The reason is that AMD memory channels are 64-bits wide, and GDDR5 transfers a minimum of an 8-bit burst, so AMD GPUs transfer a minimum of 64 bytes of data to RAM at a time.  In addition, if the GPU kernel writes less than 64 contiguous bytes at a time, the memory controller will read 64 bytes, modify some of the bytes, and then write 64 back to RAM.

This is actually incorrect. The GDDR4-5 channels are 32 bits wide, so the data granularity is 32 bytes. However, cache lines are 64 bytes long, so in practice you often have 2 consecutive bursts, hence 64 bytes read or written.

And for HBM memory (R9 Nano & R9 Fury) the channels are 128 bits wide, however the burst length is reduced to 2, maintaining the same granularity of 32 bytes.

You are incorrect.  Cache lines are 64-bytes long because AMD memory channels are 64-bits wide (i.e. 2 DDR5 chips).  The GCN memory controller is not 32-bits wide, with 2 consecutive bursts to fill a cache line.
"Each memory controller is 64-bits wide and composed of two independent 32-bit GDDR5 memory channels." - pg 10:
https://www.amd.com/Documents/GCN_Architecture_whitepaper.pdf

edit: see also slide #34
http://www.slideshare.net/DevCentralAMD/gs4106-the-amd-gcn-architecture-a-crash-course-by-layla-mah