AMD has shared two big 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 products, which are among the best graphics cards. Of course, there are some small compromises, but mainstream Radeon graphics card owners can experiment with AMD ROCm (5.6.0 Alpha), a software stack previously only available with professional graphics cards.
AMD introduced Radeon Open Compute Ecosystem (ROCm) in 2016 as an open-source alternative to Nvidia's CUDA platform. ROCm supports AMD's CDNA and RDNA GPU architectures, but the list is reduced to a select number of SKUs from AMD's Instinct and Radeon Pro lineups. AMD graphics card owners have gotten other SKUs to work, but they often only do so to a certain extent.
From the Instinct portfolio, we have the Instinct MI250X, MI250, MI210, MI100, and MI50 that feature full support. Meanwhile, only the Radeon Pro W6800 and Radeon Pro V620 from the Radeon Pro's ranks are on the list. AMD has broadened the list to support the Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6600, and, surprisingly, the eight-year-old Radeon R9 Fury. However, there is a small catch. Only the Radeon R9 Fury arrives with full software-level support from the ROCm platform, whereas the other two RDNA 2 offerings have partial support. For instance, the Radeon RX 6900 XT only supports the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP) SDK; meanwhile, only the HIP runtime is enabled on the Radeon RX 6600.
AMD had initially designed ROCm to work with Linux. There were workarounds to get ROCm to run on Windows-based systems, like virtualization methods like Docker or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Logically, there's a slight performance hit compared to running ROCm on a native Linux system. AMD has now embraced Windows on ROCm, which users have been asking for a long time. Sadly, only a few AMD SKUs are on the Windows support list.
None of AMD's Instinct accelerators support ROCm on Windows. Only the Radeon Pro W6800, Radeon RX 6900 XT, and Radeon RX 6600 are on the list for Windows support. The Radeon R9 Fury is a particular case. While it has full ROCm software support, the Fiji-based graphics card only works in Linux on a community level. It basically means that AMD doesn't have the Radeon R9 enabled by default in its software distributions. Instead, users will have to enable the graphics card themselves manually.
It's great to see AMD widening the ROCm ecosystem to include consumer graphics cards. The chipmaker seems to be marching in the right direction, even if it takes a sweet time to do so.
