AMD Bringing ROCm To More RDNA3 GPUs Later This Year

AMD has issued a formal announcement now for the ROCm 5.6 compute stack release that was already covered on Phoronix earlier today. In AMD's announcement of ROCm 5.6 though there is a tease of what's to come later this year...

Excitingly, AMD is officially bringing ROCm to more RDNA3 GPUs. However, it won't be ready until later this year and it's not clear all of which Radeon consumer GPUs will ultimately be included.

In this AMD.com blog post by Vamsi Boppana it talks of RDNA3 GPU support this autumn:

"We plan to expand ROCm support from the currently supported AMD RDNA 2 workstation GPUs: the Radeon Pro v620 and w6800 to select AMD RDNA 3 workstation and consumer GPUs. Formal support for RDNA 3-based GPUs on Linux is planned to begin rolling out this fall, starting with the 48GB Radeon PRO W7900 and the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with additional cards and expanded capabilities to be released over time."

It's great to see the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at least will be officially supported. AMD ROCm has tended to focus just on AMD's professional offerings with the exception of the Radeon VII. But it's unfortunate that this formal RDNA3 support won't be here until later in the year. Recent ROCm releases have been working on RDNA3 improvements, but in any event it won't be baked until now months after these GPUs have been shipping. NVIDIA meanwhile continues supporting CUDA across their entire span of consumer and professional products going back generations and from launch-day. Hopefully the lower-tier RDNA3 GPUs will be playing nicely with this fall's ROCm stack even if not officially supported.

The limited scope of officially supported GPUs by ROCm has been one of the biggest gripes by users over this open-source GPU computing stack, so it's good to see changes happening. This announcement also comes just weeks after Lisa Su re-affirmed their commitment to improving ROCm.