Radeon ROCm 4.0 Released With CDNA GPU Support (Instinct MI100)

Announced just over one month ago to the day was the AMD Instinct MI100 and as part of that the ROCM 4.0 software stack. ROCm 4.0 didn't end up actually shipping then but today its sources were uploaded and release builds made available.

The main highlight of Radeon Open eCosystem 4.0 is support for their CDNA architecture / the Instinct MI100 (codenamed "Arcturus"). But there are also various component improvements with ROCm 4.0 to prepare it for the "Exascale Era" with it to be used by upcoming AMD supercomputer deployments. ROCm 4.0 continues the quest as well in making more NVIDIA CUDA sources compatible with the ROCm compute stack.

ROCm 4.0 is shipping with the AMD Instinct MI100 support that also includes native support for BFloat16, multi-GPU operation, and other software improvements to make use of the CDNA architecture. ROCm 4.0 also provides RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) enhancements, compatibility with Mesa's multimedia stack, and GPU debugger enhancements.

Rather peculiar with ROCm 4.0 is the officially supported hardware... Officially GFX9 "Vega" and CDNA are the supported GPUs while Polaris and Hawaii (GFX8 and GFX7) should work but not guaranteed for full support. Notably absent still are any GFX10/RDNA "Navi" graphics processors with ROCm 4.0. But what makes it peculiar is the packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver with its recent RDNA 2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) support does include a working ROCm-based OpenCL driver. So ROCm 4.0 might end up working with Navi/RDNA, but not officially or perhaps only for OpenCL... I haven't been able to get a clear answer from AMD. I'll be trying it this weekend with both Navi generations to see if ROCm 4.0 is in fact now working on these newer consumer GPUs or if it's still a dud with this newest release.

More details on today's ROCm 4.0 release via GitHub.