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That's because it really doesn't work on AMD gpus (at least on Linux.). Sure if you spent a lot of time setting up the rocm driver you might get lucky but it's alpha quality at best and in my case (and the case of several people in this thread and the GitHub one linked) it doesn't work at all.

From skimming the thread I get the impression it's a beta quality / work-in-progres kind of deal. Is that the case?

I was following the old GH issue / thread related to OpenCL support for 1.x of TensorFlow. I tinkered an got it working with opensource kernel drivers on GCN1 (HD 7970) https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22

You could do it, and GCN was good at compute (still is with Radeon VI) but I must admit it was far more complicated than any AI researcher would have liked compared to the closed source binary approach of NVidia / Cuda.