AMD ROCm 5.2 Released With New rocWMMA Library
New with ROCm 5.2 for this Linux open-source GPU compute stack are a number of new HIP APIs, support for device-side memory allocations (malloc) within the HIP-Clang compiler, the introduction of the new rocWMMA library, new test/benchmark executables for various components, some new routines for rocSOLVER, dropping Navi 12 / GFX1011 support for rocBLAS' fat binary, and OpenMP tracing (OMPT) target support for device tracing.
The new HIP API additions are in the areas of device management, HIP run-time for memory management, Graph Management, and Virtual Memory Management.
The new AMD rocWMMA library is a C++ library for accelerating mixed precision matrix multiplication and accumulation (MFMA) operations leveraging specialized GPU matrix cores. The AMD documentation goes on to sum up rocWMMA:
"rocWMMA provides a C++ API to facilitate breaking down matrix multiply accumulate problems into fragments and using them in block-wise operations that are distributed in parallel across GPU wavefronts. The API is a header library of GPU device code, meaning matrix core acceleration may be compiled directly into your kernel device code. This can benefit from compiler optimization in the generation of kernel assembly and does not incur additional overhead costs of linking to external runtime libraries or having to launch separate kernels.
rocWMMA is released as a header library and includes test and sample projects to validate and illustrate example usages of the C++ API. GEMM matrix multiplication is used as primary validation given the heavy precedent for the library. However, the usage portfolio is growing significantly and demonstrates different ways rocWMMA may be consumed."
The ROCm 5.2 release notes only mention CnetOS/RHEL 7 and 8, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3/SP4, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 20.04 as supported operating systems. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is not officially support yet with the ROCm 5.2 release, unfortunately, nor is RHEL 9.0. Though as I wrote about a short time ago this morning, the 22.20 packaged driver is preparing RHEL 9.0 and Ubuntu 22.04 support so hopefully the next ROCm release will have proper support for these new enterprise Linux distributions.
The graphics cards listed as officially supported by ROCm 5.2 are GFX9, RDNA, and CDNA hardware. The RDNA cards listed are just the Radeon Pro W6800 and Pro V620 series. ROCm has begun working for various RDNA/RDNA2 consumer GPUs but your mileage may vary.
ROCm 5.2 is available from GitHub.
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