AMD ROCm 5.6 Released With A Focus On Improving AI

It was just one month ago that ROCm 5.5.1 debuted while overnight AMD has promoted ROCm 5.6 to stable with more improvements and a particular focus on enhancing the AI capabilities for Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators. The ROCm 5.6 release also arrives just two weeks after AMD CEO Lisa Su re-affirmed their support for ROCm and working with the community to further enhance it.

The Radeon ROCm 5.6 announcement notes, "ROCm 5.6 consists of several AI software ecosystem improvements to our fast-growing user base."

Jumping further on the AI bandwagon, ROCm 5.6 has software improvements for dealing with large language models (LLMs) and now the ROCm compute stack is in full compliance with the HuggingFace unit test suite. It was earlier this month at AMD AI Day that AMD and HuggingFace announced their further collaboration. ROCm 5.6 also brings performance improvements for OpenAI Triton, CuPy, and HIP Graph.

The ROCm compute stack also has various tooling improvements, new pseudo-random generators in rocRAND, support for half-precision transforms in hipFFT/rocFFT, and various other additions.

AMD also announced that the AMD Instinct MI50, Radeon Pro VII, and Radeon VII GFX9 products will be entering maintenance mode beginning next quarter with the ROCm 5.7 release. No new features or optimizations will be made for GFX906 hardware while maintenance will continue until Q2'2024. ROCm 5.6 also adds support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5.

On a more fundamental level, the ROCm documentation site has moved from docs.amd.com to rocm.docs.amd.com. Frankly I was always left wondering why the main ROCm informational site was always left as docs.amd.com as a rather awkward location. At least now its location is a bit more clear and perhaps we'll see the docs.amd.com become a more unified documentation portal especially with a lot of their developer assets scattered all around on different AMD.com mini sites and lacking any real centralized one-stop site for all of the AMD developer resources and documentation.

More details on the ROCm 5.6 changes via the new documentation location and source code downloads available via GitHub.