Posts by Christophe Paquot
HIP 7.0 Is Coming: What You Need to Know to Stay Ahead
- 28 May 2025
At AMD, we understand that code portability between AMD and NVIDIA GPU programming models is top of mind for our customers. We are committed to making GPU development more seamless and portable across vendors. With the upcoming HIP 7.0 release in second half of 2025, we’re taking a bold step toward simplifying cross-platform programming by aligning HIP C++ even more closely with CUDA. AMD tightly integrates our automatic HIPIFY conversion tool with our HIP runtime and compiler. Users can quickly port CUDA code into HIP C++ with HIPIFY to target AMD GPUs. However, small differences between our implementation of the HIP C++ programming model and CUDA C++ often require manual intervention to adjust your code base. This causes additional work for software developers targeting GPU families from both providers. We understand this and are making changes to ROCm to reduce this friction based on customer requests. We also know adopting changes in our programming model requires early notification. We don’t take API breaking changes lightly and for your benefit, we are making an early prototype available to assist in porting to the new HIP 7.0 API. The preview release is based on ROCm 6.4.1 release for functionality but contains 7.0 API previews. It is intended as a drop-in replacement for 6.4.1 intended for non-production use, enabling users to write code with the new API and adopt HIP 7.0 more smoothly. In this blog, you will learn how HIP 7.0 aligns more closely with CUDA, what API and behavior changes to expect, and how to prepare your codebase to ensure compatibility and portability across GPU platforms. Let’s delve into the details of the API changes.