Image: AMD
You might not have heard about AMD’s ROCm. It (unofficially) stands for Radeon Open Compute PlatforM—a pretty terrible acronym—and it’s pronounced “rock ’em.” This is a way for programs to take advantage of the computing power in a graphics card instead of a CPU. Think of it as a software accelerator, sort of like AMD’s version of Nvidia CUDA. And it’s about to become a lot more relevant.
PCWorld contributor Will Smith got to speak with Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President of GPU Technologies at AMD. While ROCm is mostly relevant for large-scale “big iron” enterprise applications right now, the latest changes are making it more relevant for regular Windows users.
How so? Well, the new HIP (Heterogeneous Interface for Portability) SDK. It’s a bit of special sauce that lets programs designed to use CUDA and similar systems tap into ROCm’s power to leverage Radeon graphics cards. And it has the potential to be a huge game-changer. Basically, any local program that needs extra power—from AI applications to rendering to file processing and beyond—can benefit from this, with only small tweaks needed to get existing code up and running in most cases.
Check out the full video interview above for the technical ins and outs. And for more deep dives into the latest PC tech, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld and The Full Nerd Network on YouTube.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.
