ROCm 6.1 release highlights#

Applies to Linux and Windows

2024-01-31

12 min read time

The ROCm™ 6.1 release consists of new features and fixes to improve the stability and performance of AMD Instinct™ MI300 GPU applications. Notably, we’ve added:

  • Full support for Ubuntu 22.04.4.

  • rocDecode, a new ROCm component that provides high-performance video decode support for AMD GPUs. With rocDecode, you can decode compressed video streams while keeping the resulting YUV frames in video memory. With decoded frames in video memory, you can run video post-processing using ROCm HIP, avoiding unnecessary data copies via the PCIe bus.

    To learn more, refer to the rocDecode documentation.

OS and GPU support changes#

ROCm 6.1 adds the following operating system support:

  • MI300A: Ubuntu 22.04.4 and RHEL 9.3

  • MI300X: Ubuntu 22.04.4

Future releases will add additional operating systems to match the general offering. For older generations of supported AMD Instinct products, we’ve added Ubuntu 22.04.4 support.

Tip

To view the complete list of supported GPUs and operating systems, refer to the system requirements page for Linux and Windows.

Installation packages#

This release includes a new set of packages for every module (all libraries and binaries default to DT_RPATH). Package names have the suffix rpath; for example, the rpath variant of rocminfo is rocminfo-rpath.

Warning

The new rpath packages will conflict with the default packages; they are meant to be used only in environments where legacy DT_RPATH is the preferred form of linking (instead of DT_RUNPATH). We do not recommend installing both sets of packages.

ROCm components#

The following sections highlight select component-specific changes. For additional details, refer to the Changelog.

AMD System Management Interface (SMI) Tool#

  • New monitor command for GPU metrics. Use the monitor command to customize, capture, collect, and observe GPU metrics on target devices.

  • Integration with E-SMI. The EPYC™ System Management Interface In-band Library is a Linux C-library that provides in-band user space software APIs to monitor and control your CPU’s power, energy, performance, and other system management functionality. This integration enables access to CPU metrics and telemetry through the AMD SMI API and CLI tools.

Composable Kernel (CK)#

  • New architecture support. CK now supports to the following architectures to enable efficient image denoising on the following AMD GPUs: gfx1030, gfx1100, gfx1031, gfx1101, gfx1032, gfx1102, gfx1034, gfx1103, gfx1035, gfx1036

  • FP8 rounding logic is replaced with stochastic rounding. Stochastic rounding mimics a more realistic data behavior and improves model convergence.

HIP#

  • New environment variable to enable kernel run serialization. The default HIP_LAUNCH_BLOCKING value is 0 (disable); which causes kernels to run as defined in the queue. When set to 1 (enable), the HIP runtime serializes the kernel queue, which behaves the same as AMD_SERIALIZE_KERNEL.

hipBLASLt#

  • New GemmTuning extension parameter GemmTuning allows you to set a split-k value for each solution, which is more feasible for performance tuning.

hipFFT#

  • New multi-GPU support for single-process transforms Multiple GPUs can be used to perform a transform in a single process. Note that this initial implementation is a functional preview.

HIPIFY#

  • Skipped code blocks: Code blocks that are skipped by the preprocessor are no longer hipified under the --default-preprocessor option. To hipify everything, despite conditional preprocessor directives (#if, #ifdef, #ifndef, #elif, or #else), don’t use the --default-preprocessor or --amap options.

hipSPARSELt#

  • Structured sparsity matrix support extensions Structured sparsity matrices help speed up deep-learning workloads. We now support B as the sparse matrix and A as the dense matrix in Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (SPMM). Prior to this release, we only supported sparse (matrix A) x dense (matrix B) matrix multiplication. Structured sparsity matrices help speed up deep learning workloads.

hipTensor#

  • 4D tensor permutation and contraction support. You can now perform tensor permutation on 4D tensors and 4D contractions for F16, BF16, and Complex F32/F64 datatypes.

MIGraphX#

  • Improved performance for transformer-based models. We added support for FlashAttention, which benefits models like BERT, GPT, and Stable Diffusion.

  • New Torch-MIGraphX driver. This driver calls MIGraphX directly from PyTorch. It provides an mgx_module object that you can invoke like any other Torch module, but which utilizes the MIGraphX inference engine internally. Torch-MIGraphX supports FP32, FP16, and INT8 datatypes.

    • FP8 support. We now offer functional support for inference in the FP8E4M3FNUZ datatype. You can load an ONNX model in FP8E4M3FNUZ using C++ or Python APIs, or migraphx-driver. You can quantize a floating point model to FP8 format by using the --fp8 flag with migraphx-driver. To accelerate inference, MIGraphX uses hardware acceleration on MI300 for FP8 by leveraging FP8 support in various backend kernel libraries.

MIOpen#

  • Improved performance for inference and convolutions. Inference support now provided for Find 2.0 fusion plans. Additionally, we’ve enhanced the Number of samples, Height, Width, and Channels (NHWC) convolution kernels for heuristics. NHWC stores data in a format where the height and width dimensions come first, followed by channels.

OpenMP#

  • Implicit Zero-copy is triggered automatically in XNACK-enabled MI300A systems. Implicit Zero-copy behavior in non unified_shared_memory programs is triggered automatically in XNACK-enabled MI300A systems (for example, when using the HSA_XNACK=1 environment variable). OpenMP supports the ‘requires unified_shared_memory’ directive to support programs that don’t want to copy data explicitly between the CPU and GPU. However, this requires that you add these directives to every translation unit of the program.

  • New MI300 FP atomics. Application performance can now improve by leveraging fast floating-point atomics on MI300 (gfx942).

RCCL#

  • NCCL 2.18.6 compatibility. RCCL is now compatible with NCCL 2.18.6, which includes increasing the maximum IB network interfaces to 32 and fixing network device ordering when creating communicators with only one GPU per node.

  • Doubled simultaneous communication channels. We improved MI300X performance by increasing the maximum number of simultaneous communication channels from 32 to 64.

rocALUTION#

  • New multiple node and GPU support. Unsmoothed and smoothed aggregations and Ruge-Stueben AMG now work with multiple nodes and GPUs. For more information, refer to the API documentation.

rocDecode#

  • New ROCm component. rocDecode ROCm’s newest component, providing high-performance video decode support for AMD GPUs. To learn more, refer to the documentation.

ROCm Compiler#

  • Combined projects. ROCm Device-Libs, ROCm Compiler Support, and hipCC are now located in the llvm-project/amd subdirectory of AMD’s fork of the LLVM project. Previously, these projects were maintained in separate repositories. Note that the projects themselves will continue to be packaged separately.

  • Split the ‘rocm-llvm’ package. This package has been split into a required and an optional package:

    • rocm-llvm(required): A package containing the essential binaries needed for compilation.

    • rocm-llvm-dev(optional): A package containing binaries for compiler and application developers.

ROCm Data Center Tool (RDC)#

  • C++ upgrades. RDC was upgraded from C++11 to C++17 to enable a more modern C++ standard when writing RDC plugins.

ROCm Performance Primitives (RPP)#

  • New backend support. Audio processing support added for the HOST backend and 3D Voxel kernels support for the HOST and HIP backends.

ROCm Validation Suite#

  • New datatype support. Added BF16 and FP8 datatypes based on General Matrix Multiply(GEMM) operations in the GPU Stress Test (GST) module. This provides additional performance benchmarking and stress testing based on the newly supported datatypes.

rocSOLVER#

  • New EigenSolver routine. Based on the Jacobi algorithm, a new EigenSolver routine was added to the library. This routine computes the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix with improved performance.

ROCTracer#

  • New versioning and callback enhancements. Improved to match versioning changes in HIP Runtime and supports runtime API callbacks and activity record logging. The APIs of different runtimes at different levels are considered different API domains with assigned domain IDs.

Upcoming changes#

  • ROCm SMI will be deprecated in a future release. We advise migrating to AMD SMI now to prevent future workflow disruptions.

  • hipCC supports, by default, the following compiler invocation flags:

    • -mllvm -amdgpu-early-inline-all=true

    • -mllvm -amdgpu-function-calls=false

    In a future ROCm release, hipCC will no longer support these flags. It will, instead, use the Clang defaults:

    • -mllvm -amdgpu-early-inline-all=false

    • -mllvm -amdgpu-function-calls=true

    To evaluate the impact of this change, include --hipcc-func-supp in your hipCC invocation.

    For information on these flags, and the differences between hipCC and Clang, refer to ROCm Compiler Interfaces.

  • Future ROCm releases will not provide clang-ocl. For more information, refer to the clang-ocl README.

  • The following operating systems will be supported in a future ROCm release. They are currently only available in beta.

    • RHEL 9.4

    • RHEL 8.10

    • SLES 15 SP6

  • As of ROCm 6.2, we’ve planned for end-of-support for:

    • Ubuntu 20.04.5

    • SLES 15 SP4

    • RHEL/CentOS 7.9