AMD this morning announced the release of the latest version of its desktop GPU software, ROCm 5.7. Along with making several important changes to the software – especially in improving support for large language models (LLMs) and other machine learning tools – the company has also published a blog post detailing future plans for hardware development. In short, the company will be bringing official support to a limited range of RDNA 3 video cards starting this fall.
AMD’s partner in NVIDIA’s CUDA and Intel’s OneAPI software stacks, AMD has historically focused on low-end devices with their GPU computing software. ROCm exists first and foremost to support the AMD Instinct line of accelerators (used in projects such as the Frontier supercomputer), and as a result, support for non-Instinct products has been limited. In fact, AMD only supports software for RNDA 2 architecture cards (Radeon Pro W6800 & V620), while unofficial support is available for other RDNA 2 cards and architectures – although in practice this has proven to be useful. a mixed bag of how it works reliably. Therefore, any announcement of Radeon video card support for the ROCm is notable, especially when it involves a consumer Radeon card.
Closing out their ROCm 5.6 announcement blog, AMD is announcing that support for early RDNA 3 features will arrive this fall. To kick things off, the company is adding support for the Radeon Pro W7900 – AMD’s highest-end card – and, for the first time, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Both units are based on the RDNA 3 GPU (Navi 31), so structurally they are similar, and it’s a welcome sign to see AMD finally embracing and bringing the consumer Radeon card into the fold.
In short, RDNA 3’s compute core differs significantly from RDNA 2 (and CDNA 2) due to the implementation of two SIMD processes, and the need to remove ILP from the instruction stream. So the addition of proper support for RDNA 3 on the ROCm stack is not a small task for the AMD software team, especially when they are working to support the launch of the MI300 (CDNA 3) family of accelerators later this year.
Along with the first two Navi 31 cards, AMD is also committed to bringing support for “additional cards and expansion capabilities to be released over time.” Until now, support for AMD’s official graphics cards has never gone beyond one GPU within a given generation (eg Navi 21), so it will be interesting to see if this means AMD is expanding its scope to include more Navi 3x GPUs, or if this just means support for more Navi cards 31 (eg W7800). AMD’s statement also seems to imply that support for the entire ROCm phase may not be available for the first iteration of RDNA 3 support, but that may be reading too much.
Meanwhile, while not official by any means, AMD’s blog post also mentions that the company is making progress on their unofficial support for Radeon products, too. Most of the issues with ROCm on unsupported GPUs have been fixed in the ROCm 5.6 release, which should make the software more usable every day on more hardware.
Overall, this is a welcome development to see that AMD is also implementing support for the latest GPU architectures within their compute, as Navi 3x’s potential as a desktop product has not been diminished since its launch more than half a year ago. AMD has taken years of unnecessary ROCm support for their bread and butter GPU products, so this announcement, along with Comments of the CEO Dr. Lisa Su earlier this month that AMD is working on improving their ROCm support, it shows that AMD is making progress (and much expected) with improving ROCm properties.
Although AMD plans to add hardware support for ROCm, they also plan to remove it. Support for products based on AMD’s Vega 20 GPU, such as the Instinct MI50 and Radeon Pro VII, should start sunset later this year. ROCm support for those products will be entering maintenance mode in Q3, with the release of ROCm 5.7, during which no additional or performance optimizations will be added to the hardware branch. Bug fixes and security updates will continue to be released for about another year. In the end, AMD is giving solid heads that it is looking to drop support for the devices after Q2 of 2024.
Finally, for anyone who was hoping to see full Windows support for ROCm, even before some rumors, this did not happen with ROCm 5.6. Currently, AMD has very little support for Windows in the ROCm toolchain (ROCm is used for AMD backin in the Linux and Windows editions of Blender) and the ROCm development documentation shows that they continue to work on this; but full Windows support is still missing from the software. AMD has remained mum on the matter, and the company is avoiding doing anything that might anticipate the release of ROCm-on-Windows. That said, I’m still hoping to see proper Windows support at some point in the future, but there’s no sign of that happening anytime soon. Especially with the MI300 on the horizon, AMD seems to have bigger fish to fry.
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