AMD Working Towards ROCm Support On Windows & Support For Consumer-Tier Radeon GPUs
AMD is bringing the Radeon Open Compute ecosystem (ROCm) to Windows and added support for the library to consumer-grade GPUs. This was found in the newest AMD ROCm 5.6.0 Alpha update documentation, mentioned in a tweet by user "nacasha."
AMD is set to offer consumer-grade support for the ROCm software stack in the unreleased 5.6.0 Alpha version
The AMD ROCm library was introduced in 2016 to compete with NVIDIA's CUDA software, with full support for Linux. The difference AMD offered above NVIDIA was that the company chose to keep the library open-source to engineers, having complete access to the coding.
The AMD ROCm library supports AMD Instinct and Radeon Pro GPUs, which are part of the RDNA and CDNA architectures—for any additional support before this recent release required software modifications. For instance, users can utilize Windows Subsystem for Linux or virtualization software such as Docker. With the long-requested Windows support, a selection of AMD GPUs has opened support for ROCm.
AMD's ROCm allows researchers to access the backing of AMD Instinct accelerators to aid scientific research. The company created the ROCm platform for "open portability, supporting environments across multiple accelerator vendors and architectures." In the newest release, consumers and developers can access "turn-key HPC application and ML framework containers on Infinity hub, improved developer tools, and streamlined installation and enhanced documentation." All users can expect lower levels of kernel launch latency with increased performance.
The added benefits of ROCm are its AI capabilities. Access to machine learning to boost the timeframe of research in any field is a bonus for medicine and other essential sciences. Thanks to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, what used to take years is now cut into a fraction of the time.
Twitter user nacasha mentioned on March 23rd about the existence of the AMD whitepaper:
AMDのことデスっていたらROCmドキュメントがアップデートされた。ROCm 5.6 RX6900XとRadeon RX 6600がサポート。RDNA3はまだない? LinuxだけではなくWindowsもサポート。 まだアルファ版? なのでドキュメントはアップデートされるかも。https://t.co/lJP3Q8ZuRY
— nacasha (@nakasya911) March 24, 2023
The whitepaper is inaccessible to consumers or the media and is only available to AMD's authorized users. However, the GitHub page shows the supported list of GPUs to be added once 5.6.0 Alpha hits. Currently, a PDF whitepaper by AMD is under strict "lock and key," but a simple web search did show enough information to verify the existence of Windows support.
Available SKUs for the AMD ROCm Windows-supported library are now:
Instinct (all previously supported on Linux)
- MI250X
- MI250
- MI210
- MI100
- MI150
Radeon
- Radeon Pro V620 (previously supported)
- Radeon Pro W6800 (previously supported)
- Radeon RX 6900 XT
- Radeon RX 6600
- Radeon R9 Fury
The unreleased AMD ROCm 5.6.0 Alpha will offer complete support for the Radeon R9 Fury, which debuted in 2015, and the Radeon RX 6600 and Radeon RX 6900 XT will only have access to the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability SDK (HIP).
It should be noted that the accelerators found in the AMD Instinct line are not supported in the Windows-based ROCm library. Also, for those users that still have access to the Radeon R9 Fury, the support for Windows must be manually activated as it only maintains access in the Linux community.
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