AMD (opens in new tab) shared two big pieces of news for the ROCm community. Not only is the ROCm SDK coming to Windows, but AMD has extended support to the company’s consumer Radeon product, one of his best graphics cards. Of course, there are some small compromises, but the owner of his Radeon graphics card in the mainstream decided to upgrade the AMD ROCm (5.6.0 Alpha), a software stack that was previously only available on professional graphics cards. you can try.
AMD introduced the Radeon Open Compute Ecosystem (ROCm) in 2016 as an open source alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA platform. ROCm will support AMD’s CDNA and RDNA GPU architectures, but the list has been narrowed down to a select number of SKUs from AMD’s Instinct and Radeon Pro lineup. An AMD graphics card owner can get his other SKUs working, but often only to a limited extent.
The Instinct portfolio includes Instinct MI250X, MI250, MI210, MI100, and MI50 featuring full support. Meanwhile, only the Radeon Pro W6800 and Radeon Pro V620 are on the list from the Radeon Pro ranks. I’ve expanded the list for you. There is a small problem though. Only the Radeon R9 Fury offers full software-level support from his ROCm platform, while his other two RDNA 2 offerings offer partial support. For example, the Radeon RX 6900 XT only supports the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP) SDK. On the other hand, Radeon RX 6600 only has HIP runtime enabled.
| GPUs | architecture | SW level | LLVM target | Linux | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon RX 6900 XT | rDNA 2 | Hip SDK | gfx1030 | correspondence | correspondence |
| Radeon RX 6600 | rDNA 2 | HIP runtime | gfx1031 | correspondence | correspondence |
| Radeon R9 Fury | Fiji | full | gfx803 | community | not supported |
AMD originally designed ROCm to run on Linux. There have been workarounds for running ROCm on Windows-based systems, including virtualization methods such as Docker and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Logically there is a slight performance hit compared to running his ROCm on a native Linux system. AMD has adopted Windows on ROCm, which users have been asking for for a long time. Unfortunately, there are only a few AMD SKUs on the Windows support list.
There are no AMD Instinct accelerators that support ROCm on Windows. Windows support list includes Radeon Pro W6800, Radeon RX 6900 XT, and Radeon RX 6600 only. The Radeon R9 Fury is a special case. It fully supports ROCm software, but Fiji-based graphics cards only work with community-level Linux. This basically means that Radeon R9 is not enabled by default in AMD’s software distribution. Instead, users must manually enable their graphics card.
It’s great to see AMD expanding their ROCm ecosystem to include consumer graphics cards. Even if it takes time, chipmakers seem to be on the right track.
