AMD releasedROCm 6.4, bringing along several improvements, including framework enhancements, broader OS support, and enhancements to several performance and profiling tools. What it continues to lack is enablement forRDNA 4GPUs, which may discourage developers from shifting to AMD’s latest architecture.
When RDNA 4 hit shelves last month, day-one ROCm compatibility was highly anticipated, as wasteasedby AMD’s VP of AI Software. ROCm is AMD’s open-source GPU programming platform, rivaling Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem to power HPC and AI applications. ROCm is chiefly focused on AMD’s MI Instinct Accelerators and its prosumerRadeonPro family, but support has slowly been trickling down to consumer-grade Radeon GPUs, just not as fast as CUDA.
RDNA 4 brings several architectural improvements to the table, doubling FP16 operations per cycle, with an x8 increase in INT4 operations with sparsity. Furthermore, with support for FP8, RDNA 4 can dish out an eightfold increase over RDNA3’s FP16 capabilities, again with sparsity. Without official ROCm support, these enhancements are effectively dormant. And, ironically enough, the first mention of Navi 48 (the GPU that powers the RX 9070 series)traces backto a ROCm patch last year.
In any case, AMD introduced several changes with ROCm 6.4, which can be summarized as:
Despiterecent pushesto challenge the CUDA moat, AMD’s hardware support remains perpetually behind Nvidia’s. ROCm support for consumer-grade Radeon GPUs onWindows, which began in 2022, now extends across almost all GPUs from the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 families, excluding HIP SDK support for the RX 6600 to RX 6750 XT range. I said “almost all” as the list lacks the RX 7650 GRE and the RX 7900 GRE. TheLinuxside is even more dire, compatible with only four Radeon GPUs.
It’s not all bad news, as you can now use ROCm on AMD’sStrix Halofamily of APUs featuring up to 128GB of memory, making them great options for powering AI and HPC workloads on the go. AMD generally releases ROCm updates on a monthly cadence, so we could see RDNA 4 support spring up with the next release. However, this inconsistency could sway developers towards Nvidia, which offers better and more predictable compatibility.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
