AMD opens ROCm: More transparency for developers and the community

AMD has announced that it will release parts of its ROCm software stack and hardware documentation as open source in a future update. This is in response to community feedback requesting improvements to software and AI support for Radeon GPUs.

In the past, AMD has been criticized for the lack of software support for ROCm. Companies such as The tiny Corp criticized the unstable drivers that led to problems with Radeon RX GPUs. The proposed solution was to make the Radeon software and ROCm open source in order to involve the community in development and optimization.

AMD has apparently taken the community’s criticism seriously and now wants to make parts of its ROCm stack and hardware documentation open source. In addition, a tracker called “fuzzyHSA” has been set up to collect feedback and provide updates. AMD is also working on software and firmware updates to fix the known issues. The current status of development will be published on GitHub shortly. With ROCm, AMD is competing with NVIDIA’s CUDA and Intel’s oneAPI. CUDA is currently the market leader in the AI segment, while oneAPI is being developed by various companies as an alternative to CUDA.

Opening up ROCm to the community could help AMD to improve its software and gain ground in the AI segment. It remains to be seen how the open source initiative will affect the development of ROCm and the competition in the AI market. To summarize, AMD is taking an important step towards better software support for Radeon GPUs by opening up ROCm. The open source initiative could help to improve the performance and stability of ROCm and make AMD more competitive in the AI segment.

Source: TheTinyCorp