Radeon ROCm 2.8 Released But Still Without Navi Support

AMD released Radeon Open eCosystem 2.8 (ROCm 2.8) for ending out September. But to some surprise and sadness, this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack still isn't supporting the Navi GPUs.

When seeing ROcm 2.8 hit the wire we immediately thought it may have been the release introducing support for Navi with the Radeon RX 5700 series being available since July, but that turned out to not be the case... ROCm 2.8 still doesn't appear to be supporting compute/OpenCL capabilities for Navi graphics processors. Though it's not entirely surprising with ROCm being mostly focused on workstation/professional accelerator use-cases and the Navi GPUs to date are just the consumer parts. But still for ROCm being AMD's main focus for taking on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance, it's a pity still not seeing Navi support. There have been signs of Navi 14 workstation graphics cards but with Navi 14 itself expected to just be a step above Polaris, it's quite possible they will be more display focused than compute accelerators.

As for the ROCm 2.8 changes, the only item mentioned by AMD is support for the NCCL 2.4.8 API. ROCm 2.8 now supports ncclCommAbort() and ncclCommGetAsyncError() for matching the latest NCCL API. NCCL is, of course, being the NVIDIA Collective Communications Library with ROCm's focus on portability in moving code-bases from NVIDIA to Radeon GPU hardware.

No other changes were mentioned as part of ROCm 2.8. The Radeon Open eCosystem 2.8 release for those interested is available via GitHub.