Rusticl Performance For AMD Strix Halo Against ROCm OpenCL

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

While ROCm 7.0 with HIP and the like is AMD's main focus, I was curious how the OpenCL performance of Mesa's Rusticl generic Rust-based OpenCL driver was competing with the ROCm 7.0 OpenCL driver. Using the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SoC with Radeon 8060S Graphics, I ran some OpenCL benchmarks in the following configurations on this same hardware/system:

Ubuntu 24.04 + ROCm 7.0 OpenCL: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS with ROCm 7.0 as the officially supported Ubuntu LTS configuration for ROCm usage.

Ubuntu 25.10 + Rusticl: Ubuntu 25.10 in its near-final form with its out-of-the-box Mesa 25.2 driver stack and Rusticl along with using Linux 6.17.

Ubuntu 25.10 + Mesa 25.3 Rusticl: Ubuntu 25.10 with its default packages but then upgrading to Mesa 25.3-devel via the Mesa ACO PPA for the very latest Mesa RadeonSI and Rusticl driver components.

Ubuntu 25.10 + ROCm 7.0 OpenCL: Installing the ROCm 7.0 user-space components but running on Ubuntu 25.10 and relying on its default Linux 6.17 AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers rather than the DKMS components not officially supported here.

From here it was off to running a range of OpenCL workloads for seeing how this generic Rusticl OpenCL driver within Mesa was competing against ROCm 7.0 OpenCL on Strix Halo.