Radeon ROCm 5.0 Released With Some RDNA2 GPU Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 10 February 2022 at 06:06 AM EST. 73 Comments
RADEON
Overnight AMD quietly released ROCm 5.0 for improving the Radeon Open eCosystem. Most exciting with ROCm 5.0 is having some level of Navi 2x / RDNA2 GPU support!

Radeon ROCm 5.0 is now publicly available and the headlining change with this big version bump is supporting the Radeon Pro V620 and Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPUs. These are the first RDNA2-based GPUs to be officially supported by the ROCm open-source GPU compute software stack.


Navi 1x/2x support has long been absent from ROCm. There was some Navi bits working in ROCm 4.5 while in ROCm 5.0 there is now official Navi 2x support at least as it concerns their workstation GPUs. AMD doesn't officially endorse ROCm for their consumer GPUs but generally now that the workstation support is advertised, it's likely the Radeon RX 6000 series should be working fine with ROCm. Navi 1x support has been lacking in ROCm, but hopefully ROCm 5.0 will iron things out there as well... I'll be testing ROCm 5.0 on various Navi GPUs shortly to see how well their open-source compute stack is now working for their modern consumer Radeon GPUs; I wasn't briefed in advance by AMD on ROCm 5.0 and difficult to raise any answers at 4AM from them otherwise.

It also remains to be indicated whether they have restored the Polaris GPU support in ROCm 5.0. With ROCm 4.5 the Polaris support was broken to which they indicated it was an unintended regression with still passively supporting those older GPUs but have made no indication in their release notes whether Polaris support is fixed.

The release notes also mention AMD ROCm 5.0 as adding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 support, support for installing the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel mode driver code from ROCm, improved installation/removal handling, a new documentation portal at docs.amd.com, the "__managed__" memory keyword is now supported by HIP, and a variety of other HIP updates for easing CUDA code-bases over to AMD GPUs.

Downloads and more details on ROCm 5.0 over on GitHub. I'll be trying ROCm 5.0 on some Radeon RX GPUs over the coming days.
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