AMD’s ROCm update supports new GPU hardware
Article By : Graham Prophet
ROCm now supports all Polaris architecture-based graphics products, including the Radeon RX 460, 470 and 480 graphics cards.
AMD has rolled out a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm), an open source platform that features support for new GPU hardware, math libraries and modern programming languages.
In addition to support of new Radeon GPU hardware and other features designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems, AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL as well as support for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs.
“Radeon Open Compute is a platform for a new era of GPU problem-solving, designed to harness the power of open source software to unlock new solutions for HPC and hyperscale computing,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “
The new release of ROCm introduces a wide range of updates, including:
Expanded GPU support – ROCm now supports all Polaris architecture-based graphics products, including the Radeon RX 460, 470 and 480 graphics cards, and the Radeon Pro WX 7100, 5100 and 4100 GPUs. The Polaris architecture is specifically designed to benefit low-level programming, helping developers to extract the most from the hardware.
ROCm Virtualisation of the GPU hardware via OS Containers and Linux’s Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) – ROCm now supports Docker containerisation, allowing end-users to simplify the deployment of an application in ROCm-enabled Linux server environments. ROCm also supports GPU Hardware Virtualisation via KVM pass-through to allow the benefits of hardware-accelerated GPU computing in virtualised solutions.
Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) – HCC is a single source ISO C++ 11/14 compiler for both CPU and GPU, with support for the C++17 “Parallel Standard Template Library”. It is built on a rich compiler infrastructure including LLVM-based GCN ISA code generation with assembler and disassembler support.
Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability (HIP) – HIP enables developers to port CUDA applications to ROCm using HIPIFY which automates the conversion to the HIP kernel language and runtime API, creating portable applications that can run on virtually any GPU using either NVIDIA's CUDA Compiler or HCC.
New Math Acceleration Libraries – ROCm introduces support for new advanced math acceleration libraries with support for BLAS, FFT and N-dimensional tensor contractions.