AMD Talking Up Open-Source & Open Standards Ahead Of "Advancing AI" Event

On 14 December is the previously-announced launch of 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" and Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors via a webcast from NASDAQ that Intel is promoting as the "AI Everywhere" event. AMD meanwhile recently announced an "Advancing AI" event for the week prior. While details on the AMD Advancing AI event are light, it's all the more interesting now with AMD teasing open standards and open-source around the event.

The event page for the AMD Advancing AI virtual event on 6 December simply reads:

"Join us to discover how AMD and its partners are powering the future of AI."

Quite possibly about the AMD Instinct MI300 series when thinking about the timing, hardware cycles, and AI focus. But making me all the more intrigued is that today they are also promoting this Advancing AI event as about open standards and open-source.

AMD posted today on Twitter/X:

"Open standards. Open source. An open ecosystem of innovators. AMD is enabling AI to advance, so the world’s most important challenges can be solved. Openly."

That certainly piqued my interest leading up to this event. This could encompass how the AMD Instinct accelerators (and other Radeon graphics products) have open-source Linux drivers, the open-source ROCm compute stack, etc, just how it's been open-source and embracing an open ecosystem for years... Though hopefully it's something more.

AMD promoting "open" elements for its Advancing AI event.

I know many Phoronix readers would love to hear of ROCm coming to more Radeon (consumer) hardware. Lisa Su has signaled further improving ROCm and bringing their compute stack to more hardware. They said ROCm would come to more hardware later in the year while so far that's yielded the RX 7900 XTX and Radeon Pro W7900 while the lower-tier parts of the RDNA3 Pro and consumer hardware have yet to see official ROCm support.

The sad list of currently supported Radeon consumer GPUs with ROCm 5 on Linux.

The ROCm 5 support list for Radeon Pro hardware isn't much better.

So perhaps as part of the announcements at this event will be rolling out ROCm for more GPUs? Or some other major roll-out/initiative of ROCm? ROCm 4.0 launched late in the calendar year as did ROCm 3.0 and ROCm 2.0, so the timing would align if AMD will be announcing ROCm 6.0 at this 6 December event (we know how AMD likes to play with announcement dates like when 7nm Ryzen CPUs were announced on 7/7, among other conspicuously timed events).

Another possibility for this AI event and open-source could be open-source/Linux support for Ryzen AI. That GitHub ticket has now seen more than 900 comments from individuals/customers expressing interest in Ryzen AI for Linux. With Ryzen Embedded to get Ryzen AI hardware eventually, it's likely just a matter of time before there will be Linux support, especially given the enormous outpouring of interest.

In any event it will be interesting to see what AMD announces at this 6 December event and I am all the more interested whenever open-source and open standards get brought up. Let me know in the forums what you think or hope AMD will be announcing at this event.