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.
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| GPU | Architecture | SW Level | LLVM Target | Linux | Windows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon RX 6900 XT | RDNA 2 | HIP SDK | gfx1030 | Supported | Supported |
| Radeon RX 6600 | RDNA 2 | HIP Runtime | gfx1031 | Supported | Supported |
| Radeon R9 Fury | Fiji | Full | gfx803 | Community | Unsupported |
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.