alt Hacker NewsAMD hasn't signaled in behavior or words that they're going to actually support ROCm on $specificdevice for more than 4-5 years after release. Sometimes it's as little as the high 3.x years for shrinks like the consumer AMD RX 580. And often the ROCm support for consumer devices isn't out until a year after release, further cutting into that window.
Meanwhile nvidia just dropped CUDA/driver support for 1xxx series cards from their most recent drivers this year.
For me ROCm's mayfly lifetime is a dealbreaker.
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Is it really that short? This support matrix shows ROCm 7.2.1 supporting quite old generations of GPUs, going back at least five or six years. I consider longevity important, too, but if they're actively supporting stuff released in 2020 (CDNA), I can't fault them too much. With open drivers on Linux, where all the real AI work is happening, I feel like this is a better longevity story than nvidia...where you're dependent on nvidia for kernel drivers in addition to CUDA.
https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/compatibility/compatibil...
ROCm is open source and TheRock is community maintained, and in a minute the first Linux distro will have native in-tree builds. It will be supported for the foreseeable future due to AMDs open development approach.
It is Nvidia that has the track record of closed drivers and insisting on doing all software dev without community improvements to expected results.
I was thinking to get 2x r9700 for a home workstation (mostly inference). It is much cheaper than a similar nvidia build. But still not sure if good value or more trouble.
The splist CDNA/RDNA architecture is a problem for AMD. The upcoming unified UDMA will solve the issue.
Driver support eats directly into driver development
Last year, AMD ran a GitHub poll for ROCm complaints and received more than 1,000 responses. Many were around supporting older hardware, which is today supported either by AMD or by the community, and one year on, all 1,000 complaints have been addressed, Elangovan said. AMD has a team going through GitHub complaints, but Elangovan continues to encourage developers to reach out on X where he’s always happy to listen.
Seems like they're making some effort in that direction at least. If you have specific concerns, maybe try hitting up Anush Elangovan on Twitter?