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Comment by slavik81 | Hacker News Reader

The MI50 may be considered deprecated in newer releases, but it seems to work fine in my experience. I have a Radeon VII in my workstation (which shares the same architecture) and I host the MI60 test machine for Debian AI Team. I haven't had any trouble with them.

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I had the impression Debian applied patches that widen arch support from what upstream officially supports, including for the MI50/MI60.

https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team/rocm-hipamd/-/raw/d6d2014... (one patch of many)

I wrote that patch. It's not actually used for MI50/MI60 in any of the Debian system packages, since Debian builds for gfx906 rather than using the gfx900 fallback path that patch provides. Debian is not relying on any special patches to enhance gfx906 support. That architecture is the same as upstream.

Now, for some other GPU architectures, you're absolutely right. There are indeed important patches in Debian that enable its extra-wide hardware compatibility.

Thanks for all your work on this.

I don’t think the mi60 has reached deprecated status yet (the last time I look at prices for the mi50 and mi60, the mi60 was something like 3x expensive, and I think thats because its still officially supported), but I’ll check this all out. Thanks.

The MI60 is basically just a faster MI50 with more memory. They were deprecated together. It's plausible there could be small firmware or driver differences that cause issues in one but not the other, but I think that's unlikely.

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