Posts by Saad Rahim
AMD ROCm: Powering the World’s Fastest Supercomputers
- 10 June 2025
From breaking the exaFLOP barrier with Frontier to setting new performance records with El Capitan, AMD is transforming what’s possible in high-performance computing (HPC). But the story goes beyond hardware. At the core of these world-class systems is ROCm, AMD’s open, high-performance software platform enabling new levels of scientific discovery and AI advancement.
The ROCm Revisited Series
- 06 June 2025
The ROCm Revisited series aims to revisit key concepts of the AMD ROCm software platform, tools, and optimizations, tailored for beginner and intermediate developers. This series shares our journey through the evolution of ROCm, highlighting the milestones, innovative technologies, and challenges we’ve overcome to establish leadership in the supercomputing space. Each post explores different aspects of ROCm’s development, focusing on how it has transformed industries, particularly in AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC). Through these blog posts, we’ll also discuss our commitment to open-source development and the future potential of distributed and energy-efficient computing. Below are the three blogs included in the series:
ROCm Revisited: Getting Started with HIP
- 06 June 2025
This blog is part of our ROCm Revisited series[1]. The purpose of this series is to share the story of ROCm and our journey through the changes and successes we’ve achieved over the past few years.
ROCm Revisited: Evolution of the High-Performance GPU Computing Ecosystem
- 06 June 2025
This blog is part of our ROCm Revisited series[1]. The purpose of this series is to share the story of ROCm and our journey through the changes and successes we’ve achieved over the past few years. We’ll explore the key milestones in our development, the innovative technologies that have propelled us forward, and the challenges we’ve overcome to establish our leadership in the world of GPU computing.
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 release for functionality but contains 7.0 API previews. It is intended as a drop-in replacement for 6.4 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.
ROCm Runfile Installer Is Here!
- 22 May 2025
From ROCm 6.4, and after much user demand, we are introducing the ROCm Runfile Installer method primarily for network secured environments, or those who wish to bypass a native Linux package management system, or those that just want to download and run a single file to install ROCm.
Introducing ROCm-DS: GPU-Accelerated Data Science for AMD Instinct™ GPUs
- 20 May 2025
AMD is excited to announce the early access release of ROCm-DS (ROCm Data Science), a new toolkit designed to accelerate data processing workloads on AMD Instinct™ GPUs. Built on the core ROCm toolkit, ROCm-DS promises to significantly enhance performance and scalability for data-intensive applications, catering to the pressing needs of today’s data-driven landscape. ROCm-DS is based on the open source libraries in the RAPIDS ecosystem. This collection of libraries enables a multitude of data processing operations, allowing new and existing workloads to tap into the computational advantages offered by AMD Instinct Datacenter GPUs. This early access release introduces two powerful new libraries: hipDF and hipGRAPH.
ROCm Gets Modular: Meet the Instinct Datacenter GPU Driver
- 11 April 2025
Today ROCm is synonymous with software for AMD’s Instinct GPUs. ROCm describes everything from the driver to the runtime to the libraries that enable AI and HPC software stacks. Starting in ROCm 6.4, we expand our software family to include the Instinct Datacenter GPU driver. The Instinct driver bifurcates from the current ROCm driver with a separate release process including an independent version number scheme, a new documentation site, and a laser focus on enabling applications on our datacenter GPU products. This change is depicted in the figure below.
ROCm 6.4: Breaking Barriers in AI, HPC, and Modular GPU Software
- 11 April 2025
In the rapidly evolving landscape of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, innovation is the currency of progress. AMD’s ROCm 6.4 isn’t just another software update—it’s a leap forward that redefines the boundaries of what is possible for AI, developers, researchers, and enterprise innovators.