One can confidently state that Nvidia has established dominance in the workstation GPU market, similar to its success in the consumer GPU industry. The dominance of Team Green is in fact more pronounced in the former as AMD and Intel are often not viable alternatives due to the widespread support of CUDA (Compute United Device Architecture). While OpenCL has existed for a long time, it simply has not been able to go head-to-head with the behemoth that is CUDA.
In 2016, AMD introduced its Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) in response to Nvidia"s dominance. While ROCm has gained traction among users seeking an open-source solution, there are concerns that AMD"s own actions may hinder the adoption of Radeon GPUs.
With its latest ROCm 5.6.0 update, the company announced that its Vega II or Vega 20 (gfx906 / GCN 5.1) graphics processors will be entering maintenance mode soon in Q3 of 2023. This means only critical security patches and bug fixes will be made available and no new feature support will come to Vega 20. In Q2 of 2024, the maintenance mode will also come to an end.
Speaking of Vega support, in a funny incident, Call of Duty players apparently sent pizza to the game"s dev team to get support.
Vega 20 was the second generation of Vega GPUs consisting of discrete graphics cards like the Radeon VII, the AMD Instinct MI50, and more. Meanwhile, Nvidia still supports Maxwell GPUs from 2015 and only recently withdrew support for Kepler.
The official release notes for ROCm 5.6.0 states:
AMD Instinct MI50, Radeon Pro VII, and Radeon VII products (collectively referred to as gfx906 GPUs) will be entering the maintenance mode starting Q3 2023. This will be aligned with ROCm 5.7 GA release date.
- No new features and performance optimizations will be supported for the gfx906 GPUs beyond ROCm 5.7
- Bug fixes / critical security patches will continue to be supported for the gfx906 GPUs till Q2 2024 (End of Maintenance [EOM])(will be aligned with the closest ROCm release)
- Bug fixes during the maintenance will be made to the next ROCm point release
- Bug fixes will not be back ported to older ROCm releases for this SKU
- Distro / Operating system updates will continue as per the ROCm release cadence for gfx906 GPUs till EOM.
Moving on, there is some good news too as AMD confirmed in a separate blog post that RDNA 3 (7000 series) GPUs will gain support around the same time. Some of these cards will include the Radeon PRO W7900, as well as consumer cards like the RX 7900 XTX, and more. AMD writes:
We plan to expand ROCm support from the currently supported AMD RDNA 2 workstation GPUs: the Radeon Pro v620 and w6800 to select AMD RDNA 3 workstation and consumer GPUs. Formal support for RDNA 3-based GPUs on Linux is planned to begin rolling out this fall, starting with the 48GB Radeon PRO W7900 and the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with additional cards and expanded capabilities to be released over time.
And in case you missed it, Windows support for ROCm (via nacasha on Twitter) is also in the works as you can see in the images below:
| | |
The one on the left shows a GPU support table that lists RDNA 2 cards like the RX 6600 and 6900 XT, while the one on the right shows system requirements for running AMD HIP (Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability) on Windows 10 and Windows 11.