alt Hacker NewsMy wishlist for ROCm support is actually supporting the cards they already released. But that's not going to happen.
By the time an (consumer) AMD device is supported by ROCm it'll only have a few years of ROCm support left before support is removed. Lifespan of support for AMD cards with ROCm is very short. You end up having to use Vulkan which is not optimized, of course, and a bit slower. I once bought an AMD GPU 2 years after release and 1 year after I bought it ROCm support was dropped.
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As the underdog AMD can't afford to have their efforts perceived as half-assed or a hobby or whatever. They should be moving heaven and earth to maximize their value proposition, promising and delivering on longer support horizons to demonstrate the long term value of their ecosystem.
I have a mi50 with 16gb of hbm thats collecting dust (its Vega bases, so it can play games, I guess) because I don’t want to bother setting up a system with Ubuntu 20.04, the last version of Ubuntu the last version of ROCM that supported the MI50 works on.
With situations like this, its not hard to see why Nvidia totally dominates in the compute/ai market.
Seeing Radeon VII on the deprecation list is a little saddening, unless they start putting out more 16gb+ GPUs that aren't overly expensive...
AMD has separate architectures for GPU compute (Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct/mi300....) and consumer video (Radeon).
AMD are merging the architectures (UDNA) like nVidia but it's not going to be before 2026. (https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-zen-6-cpus-radeon-udna-gpus-u...)
FWIW, every ROCm library currently in the Debian 13 'main' and Ubuntu 24.04 'universe' repository has been built for and tested on every discrete consumer GPU architecture since Vega. Not every package is available that way, but the ones that are have been tested on and work on Vega 10, Vega 20, RDNA 1, 2 and 3.
Note that these are not the packages distributed by AMD. They are the packages in the OS repositories. Not all the ROCm packages are there, but most of them are. The biggest downside is that some of them are a little old and don't have all the latest performance optimizations for RDNA 3.
Those operating systems will be around for the next decade, so that should at least provide one option for users of older hardware.