Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance on eGPU

In the last post, I wrote about how to setup an eGPU on Ubuntu to get started with TensorFlow. I shortly mentioned that a eGPU is definitely worth it for Machine Learning, but I did not tell any numbers. This article tries to catch up on that. There are a gazillion benchmarks already out there about GPU gaming performance. A handful of them also include eGPU benchmarks, like this one for example. One important thing that that these eGPU benchmarks show is that the use of an external display is from benefit, because otherwise the Thunderbolt 3 port becomes a bigger bottleneck. This is due to the fact that each rendered frame has be sent back to the internal display, which consumes valuable bandwidth of the 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 connection. However, there is no alternative for using an eGPU for Machine Learning, because the computed gradients have to be sent back to the CPU. Talking about Machine Learning, there are a few articles our official benchmarks about TensorFlow performanc