AMD released on Tuesday (02) Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) 5.5, a new version of its open source platform for application developers based on the high processing power of the brand’s video cards. The development base is available to the Linux community with several enhancements for programming with Radeon GPUs.
In the spotlight, the platform is receiving optimizations to better support video cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture — that is, all models in the Radeon RX 7000 line. This change should allow developers to extract the maximum possibilities from the latest GPUs AMD generation.
To benefit professionals who use workstations for their workflows, developers will also be able to program applications to work more closely with AMD’s professional lineup of graphics cards. The latest releases are the Radeon PRO W7900 and W7800, both equipped with RDNA 3 GPUs.
Michael Larabel, software engineer and founder of Phoronix, says that despite the noticeable improvements in ROCm for RDNA 3, AMD continues to focus on optimizing the programming environment specifically for graphics cards with CDNA architecture — including accelerators in the Instinct line , like the MI200.
Other enhancements brought by ROCm 5.5 include improvements to the Heterogeneous Computing Interface for Portability (HIP), a software development framework created by AMD itself to allow porting applications across different hardware platforms such as CPU and GPU.
AMD also cites:
- Increased the maximum size of execution stacks (16K to 128K);
- Separation of the HIPCC compiler from the HIP;
- New memory management;
- New module management;
- New APIs;
- New hierarchy in the Linux file system;
- Changes in versions of ROCm libraries.
This is one of the most important updates to the open source platform since the release of ROCm 5. With the changes, AMD makes the most complete development environment for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.
