Radeon ROCm 5.0 Released With Some RDNA2 GPU Support

[zxy_thf]

Does is mean OpenCL will work on Debian with Radeon 6800XT cards, or that's still in dreams territory?

OpenCL support is already there (I already used in on 5500 and 6700XT)
RoCm means a different set of APIs and a few more accelerated libraries (analog to CUDA+cuBLAS+cuFFT+cuDNN+....)

[billyswong]

ROCm on consumer GPUs beyond GFX9 (Vega) seems to be a WIP, that is not a great signal to consumers. I know they are prioritizing their server parts and GFX9 is the technical base there, but still. Consumer care about the support of their GPUs on day one (or when they can get their hands on one of these nowadays) - and not two years after release.

It's worse than that. Even if your GPU get support today, it can lose support tomorrow. Not just no-new-feature-for-your-old-GPU kind, but suddenly-fail-what-you-could-do-before kind. This is bad to customer trust and confidence.

[illwieckz]

Michael you may be interested by this:

• OpenCL on Linux: state of AMD drivers is now worse than it was back in the days of fglrx

AMD announced that official support for Polaris was dropped a few months ago already.
Still, it does not mean that GPUs do not work at all with ROCm anymore, far from it... you still have support for Terascale cards in the LLVM backend.

Unfortunately Clover is still not complete, and it even broke recently for the subset that was working.

It's worse than that. Even if your GPU get support today, it can lose support tomorrow. Not just no-new-feature-for-your-old-GPU kind, but suddenly-fail-what-you-could-do-before kind. This is bad to customer trust and confidence.

This is super bad, indeed.

[nsneck]

Does folding@home work with ROCm?

[Maxzor]

Michael you may be interested by this:

• OpenCL on Linux: state of AMD drivers is now worse than it was back in the days of fglrx

Unfortunately Clover is still not complete, and it even broke recently for the subset that was working.

I am far from knowledgeable on OpenCL and would enjoy having an in-depth discussion about it, but this might not be the place...
To my eyes OpenCL was a specification over C, but then it tried to be a C++ spec, and it went, not really well... from wikipedia OpenCL 3.0 "deprecates the OpenCL C++ Kernel Language [introduced with OpenCL 2.2], replacing it with the C++ for OpenCL language". It looks to me like Khronos is doing an horrendous job with OpenCL, not knowing where to lead its evolution from its C infancy. On top of that, 3.0 is now being only extensions to the core spec that really worked...
In this perspective OpenCL dying should be celebrated, and it would be a necessary transition period where each vendor has split with its paradigm, before them converging back, later on, upon a saner programming model?
AMD still might be not supporting it enough, I don't know.

[ernstp]

Does is mean OpenCL will work on Debian with Radeon 6800XT cards, or that's still in dreams territory?

Yeah, should work!? Just do

sudo apt install rocm-opencl

only, and "upstream kernel" of course.

[Mark625]

I am far from knowledgeable on OpenCL and would enjoy having an in-depth discussion about it, but this might not be the place...
To my eyes OpenCL was a specification over C, but then it tried to be a C++ spec, and it went, not really well... from wikipedia OpenCL 3.0 "deprecates the OpenCL C++ Kernel Language [introduced with OpenCL 2.2], replacing it with the C++ for OpenCL language". It looks to me like Khronos is doing an horrendous job with OpenCL, not knowing where to lead its evolution from its C infancy. On top of that, 3.0 is now being only extensions to the core spec that really worked...
In this perspective OpenCL dying should be celebrated, and it would be a necessary transition period where each vendor has split with its paradigm, before them converging back, later on, upon a saner programming model?
AMD still might be not supporting it enough, I don't know.

OpenCL beyond version 1.2 and OpenCL C++ were basically kneecapped by Nvidia. They saw their vested interest in pushing CUDA, a proprietary solution that locks their customers into their own graphics card product line. AMD tried to push OpenCL ahead with version 2.0, but Nvidia and other vendors would not put out compliant versions for their hardware. AMD finally threw in the towel and agreed to OpenCL version 3.0, which basically is 1.2 with optional "feature sets" that implement the API's from 2.0.

So OpenCL is basically a dead technology now. Nvidia is still putting all new features into CUDA and leaving OpenCL at 3.0 (aka 1.2). AMD is focusing on ROCm runtime and multiple tools that make it easier to port CUDA code sets to the AMD stack. I expect that OpenCL runtime support will continue for a long time, but the language itself will not advance in any meaningful way going forward.

[Eirikr1848]

GCN based Pro workstation cards were being sold until 2019/2020. Consumer cards (RX 590) as well. Heck, MicroCenter still sells the RX 550.

AMD needs to really hire more staff for this front. This is ridiculous

[illwieckz]

In this perspective OpenCL dying should be celebrated, and it would be a necessary transition period where each vendor has split with its paradigm, before them converging back, later on, upon a saner programming model?

We need solutions now. There are existing OpenCL software now. We want to run them now. Transitions are either about dream, either about future. If it's about future, it may be a nice future, but it's not about today, and it's not for today.

We need working OpenCL drivers today to run existing OpenCL applications today.

[flavonol]

ROCm on consumer GPUs beyond GFX9 (Vega) seems to be a WIP, that is not a great signal to consumers. I know they are prioritizing their server parts and GFX9 is the technical base there, but still. Consumer care about the support of their GPUs on day one (or when they can get their hands on one of these nowadays) - and not two years after release.

I agree with you. The lack of ROCm support for two-year-old graphics cards, along with the very limited range of supported distributions is frustrating. If Intel Arc cards support NEO I might switch over from my RDNA 1 card as soon as I can justify it.