AMD ROCm 5.4 Released With HIP Improvements

Following several ROCm 5.3 point releases, AMD today shipped ROCm 5.4 as the newest version of their open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

At least as far as the official change-log goes, ROCm 5.4 isn't exactly a big release. The noted improvements for ROCm 5.4 are all on the HIP side. The key v5.4 additions is support for the wall_clock64() function for returning the wall clock at a constant frequency on the device, the new GPU_MAX_HW_QUEUES registry that defines the maximum number of independent hardware queues allocated per-process per-device, and new HIP APIs around error handling. ROCm 5.4 also splits out HIP's test cases to a separate source repository.

That's it as far as the official changes go for ROCm 5.4. Officially supported Linux distributions for ROCm 5.4 are RHEL 8.6/8.7/9.1, SLES 15 SP4, and Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS / Ubuntu 22.0.4.1 LTS. Installation instructions and more details on the ROCm 5.4 setup can be found via docs.amd.com.

With being just a few weeks out from the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards shipping, it will be interesting to see if AMD manages to provide timely RDNA3 support for ROCm or if that's delayed until whenever a professional-grade RDNA3-based product is ready. AMD was sadly quite late in their RDNA/RDNA2 support with ROCm but now that the initial support is there hopefully they will manage to deliver more punctual RDNA3 support for those wanting to experiment with their open-source GPU compute stack on Radeon RX 7000 series consumer hardware.