AMD is announced Release of Radeon Open Compute platform (ROCm) 5.6, the latest version of the open source platform for GPU computing. If you’re looking to buy the latest GPUs, ROCM officially supports AMD Instinct RDNA 2 workstation graphics cards only. However, AMD has decided to expand its support in response to feedback regarding challenges with using his ROCm on other AMD GPUs. Sometime this fall AMD plans to extend his ROCm support to more RDNA 2 GPUs and select AMD RDNA 3 workstation and consumer GPUs.
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning have significantly increased consumer interest in GPU computing. AI acceleration has gone from a “why do we need it?” idea to a highly desirable feature. Perhaps some people were surprised by this change in the world of computing. AMD, for example, only has AI acceleration on his consumer Ryzen 7040 Phoenix chips. In contrast, mobile processor makers have been adding and tweaking AI acceleration for several generations.
AMD ROCm is said to offer a comprehensive suite of optimizations for AI and HPC workloads. It boasts “a kernel fine-tuned for large language models, support for new data types, and support for new technologies such as the OpenAI Triton programming language.”
Initial support for ROCm on RDNA 3 GPUs is planned for the fall. According to the AMD Community Blog, the first graphics cards to receive official support will be the 48GB Radeon PRO W7900 and the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Support for additional RDNA 3 cards and enhancements will be added over time.
So far, AMD’s latest ROCm 5.6 release doesn’t seem to care much about which GPU it runs on. AMD has heard that community members have been complaining about driver issues with unsupported GPUs, but “we have fixed the reported issues in ROCm 5.6 and look forward to expanding support in the future.” I will try,” he said.
