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Comment by blackcat201 | Hacker News Reader

The supported ROCm version is 4.0 which only the latest AMD instinct supports it. There's still a long way before its supported in the latest consumer RDNA 2 GPUs ( RX 6000 series )

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Lack of ROCm support in consumer RDNA 2 GPUs really makes it impossible for regular people to use ROCm. As an owner of an AMD Radeon RX 6800 I'm pretty salty about it.

I am getting some conflicting messages about support. There is a small group of people working on ROCm for Julia (in AMDGPU.jl) and while that work is still alpha quality, they seem to expect even devices as old as RX 580 to work.

Are all of these support issues something that is on the ROCm/AMD/driver side, or are they on the side of libraries like pytorch?

RX580 had a pro version which got ROCm support. It's the newer cards and older cards which aren't supported.

Can confirm, I made an 8x rx580 rig for an r&d project specifically for that reason.

Time to re-sell into the hot GPU market now? :P

Don't work there anymore; even so that server is probably buried under loads of failed ideas.

RX580 is out of support for ROCm nowadays, which only supports Vega and Instinct now.

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1353#issuec...

This is an issue with AMD not wanting to long-term support the code paths in ROCm components necessary to enable ROCm on these devices. My hope is that Polaris GPU owners will step up to the plate and contribute patches to ROCm components to ensure that their cards keep working, when AMD is unwilling to do the leg work themselves (which is fair, they aren't nearly as big or rich as NVidia).

At least they promised support.

They're actively refusing to comment on 5000-series.

Indeed. Yet, the amdgpu-pro driver supports the 5000 series.

I managed to get it to work for my 5500 XT, but only in Ubuntu and for the 5.4 kernel and it wasn’t straightforward.

It would be nice if a project like Mesa would exist for OpenCL.

In the future, I suppose Vulkan will be used instead for compute though.

It's the last thing that keeps me on Nvidia with proprietary Linux drivers. I wouldn't mind ML training on a AMD card to be slower but I need my workload to be at least GPU-accelerated.

I mean I wouldn't worry too much about it, I think if something big like PyTorch supports it AMD might rethink their strategy here. They have a lot to gain by entering the compute market.

AMD only cares about data center. Anything below that, they don't care. They don't care about supporting anything other than linux. God forbid some person try to experiment with their hardware/software as a hobby before putting it to use in a work setting.

Eh, not sure if that's correct. Their Ryzen consumer CPUs work amazingly well on Windows. The gaming graphics cards also still target Windows.

And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

> And if they do care about the data center that much and ROCm becomes a thing for compute, they will want as many people as possible to be able to experiment with ROCm at home. So that they demand data centers with ROCm.

The engineers know this and have tried to explain this to upper management, but upper management only listens to "customer interviews" which consists of management from data centers. Upper management does not care about what engineers hear from customers because those are not the customers they care about.

ROCm has been a thing for four years now, Cuda had been around almost a decade before ROCm was conceived, and AMD still doesn't show any interest in an accessible compute platform for all developers and users. I think they should focus on OpenCL and Sycl.

Well it's a chicken and egg problem.

Without major library support nobody cares about ROCm, if nobody cares about ROCm AMD management will focus on other things.

But PyTorch just laid that egg.

As far as ROCm support on consumer products, it is strictly a management problem which will takes years for them to figure out since they do not listen to their engineers and do not view users of consumer graphics cards as compute customers.

I would love an alternative to Nvidia cards. After waiting for so long for ROCm support for RDNA cards and reading an engineer's comments about why there is no support yet, I've given up on AMD for compute support on their graphics cards. I'm hoping Intel's graphic cards aren't garbage and get quick support. I probably will buy an Nvidia card before then if I have the opportunity since I'm tired of waiting for an alternative.

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