AMD ROCm 5.5 In The Process Of Being Released

AMD has begun publishing ROCm 5.5 source packages for the Radeon Open eCosystem components making up their GPU compute stack that is also being extended to cover Xilinx products and more.

The ROCm 5.5 source packages are in the process of being tagged this afternoon on GitHub! But, sadly, as of writing AMD hasn't yet published the ROCm 5.5 release notes -- they may still come today or in the days ahead as part of an official release announcement. The RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm GitHub repository hasn't yet rolled over to v5.5 but numerous ROCm components like ROCgdb, ROCgdbapi, HIPIFY, HIPCC, ROCclr, HIP, AOMP, and others have all rolled over to version 5.5 releases in the past hour via GitHub.

In any event ROCm 5.5 is exciting as it's expected to contain much-improved/working AMD RDNA3 support. ROCm for RDNA3 is all the more important with Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 GPUs shipping this quarter. Plus it should play nicely for Radeon RX 7000 series hardware too given early reports from a ROCm 5.5 release candidate Docker build from last month working well for the RX 7900 series consumer cards.

Beyond better RDNA3 support, the GitHub milestone tracker for ROCm 5.5 also indicates a wide variety of fixes in this release.

We'll hopefully learn more shortly all about what's integrated into ROCm 5.5 for the new features and fixes once the release notes are published along with the reference binaries. Benchmarking on the Radeon RX 7900 series with ROCm 5.5 if all goes well.

Update: ROCm 5.5 officially released on 2 May.