I agree about ROCm.

When it comes to comparison to SYCL, HIP is much closer to the spirit of SYCL than ROCm is. Both aim to help writing a single codebase that'll run across multiple hardwares. For now though, the trajectory of SYCL appears much more promising to me than HIP. HIP is already split in two parts for CPU and GPU, which is baffling, and neither part seems to receive much love from AMD.