AMD ROCm 3.9 Released With AOMP OpenMP Offloading Integrated

A new version of the AMD Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) has been released on the same day as the company announcing the Radeon RX 6800/6900 series. Meet ROCm 3.9.

While announced on the same day as the Big Navi RX 6800/6900 reveal, ROCm 3.9 has no mention of supporting these GPUs starting to ship in November. In fact, the Radeon RX 5000 "Navi 1" graphics cards are still not listed as supported with ROCm 3.9 with Vega/GFX9 still being listed as the latest hardware support.

Where there is to find with ROCm 3.9 includes:

- The ROCm compiler now supports OpenMP by leveraging their AOMP work with LLVM/Clang for offloading to Radeon GPus. This requires installing an extra openmp-extras package as part of ROCm 3.9. The Clang and Flang OpenMP support with ROCm 3.9 is at OpenMP 4.5 and a subset of 5.0. AOMP appears to be still be developed separately and AMD is still working to upstream those changes into LLVM/Clang for the future. With ROCm 3.9 is a mix of LLVM 11 and LLVM 12 development code comprising the ROCm stack.

- The ROCm SMI (System Management Information) can now display hardware topology, support GPU reset events and thermal throttling events in the SMI library, displaying per-PID vRAM / SDMA / CU usage, and other additions.

- Improved GEMM performance with the ROCm Math Libraries.

- ROCm 3.9 now supports Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2.

ROCm 3.9 can be downloaded from GitHub. Given the compute improvements with RDNA 2, hopefully we'll finally be seeing official Navi support in ROCm in the not too distant future.