## Finding Out, How Many GPU Cores we have, Under Linux

One question which I see written about often on the Web, is how to find out certain stats about our GPU, under Linux. Under Windows, we had GUI-based programs such as ‘GPU-Z’, etc., but under Linux, the information can be just a bit harder to find.

I think that one tool which helps, is to have ‘OpenCL’ installed, as well as the command-line utility ‘clinfo’, which exists as one out of several packages, and as an actual, resulting command-name.

If we’re serious about programming our GPU, then having a GUI won’t help us much. We’d need to get dirty with code in that case, and then to have text-based solutions is suitable. But, if we’re just spectators in this sport, then two stats we may nevertheless want to know are:

1. How many GPU-Core-Groups do we have – since GPU-Cores are organized as Groups, and
2. How many actual Shader-Cores do we have in each Group?

Interestingly, the grouping of shader-cores, also represents how many vector-processors such GPU-computing tools as OpenCL see. And so, on the computer which I name ‘Klystron’, which is running Debian / Jessie, when typing in these commands as user, I get the following results:


dirk@Klystron:~$clinfo | grep units Max compute units: 4 Max compute units: 6 dirk@Klystron:~$ clinfo | grep multiple
Kernel Preferred work group size multiple:     1
Kernel Preferred work group size multiple:     64
dirk@Klystron:~\$



This needs some explaining. On ‘Klystron’, I have the proprietary, AMD packages for OpenCL installed, since that computer has both an AMD CPU and a Radeon GPU. And this means that the OpenCL version will be able to carry out computing on both. And so I have the stats for both.

In this case, the second entries reveal that I have 6×64 cores on the GPU.