AMD Releases ROCm 5.7 GPU Compute Stack

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support.

Linux users have been very eager to see AMD ROCm officially support more RDNA3 GPUs which is said to come "later this year" but still not across that milestone. With no official RDNA3 support upgrades in ROCm 5.7, presumably this official support is waiting for ROCm 6.0... AMD's release notes do note that ROCm 6.0 will be a breaking release that isn't backwards compatible with ROCm 5.x. ROCm 6.0 will split up the LLVM packages into more manageable sizes, there will be changes to the HIP Runtime API, rocRAND and hipRAND will be split into separate packages, and other fundamental changes.

As of ROCm 5.7, the Radeon VII is the only officially supported "Radeon" product. Supported Radeon Pro hardware includes the Radeon PRO VII, Radeon PRO V620, and Radeon PRO W6800. Still no Radeon Pro W7000 series products yet. On the AMD Instinct side it's the Instinct MI25 and MI50 up through the MI250 series... The MI300 series support is still forthcoming while the MI25 support is already at the end of its life and the Instinct MI50 has also been announced now to be at the end of the support cycle for ROCm.

ROCm 5.7 does bring improvements to the non-hostcall HIP printf() handling, a beta release of LLVM Address Sanitizer with GPU support, numerous optimizations, and a variety of fixes.

More details on the changes to find with the new ROCm 5.7 release can be found via the ROCm documentation.