ROCm VS rocBLAS

Compare ROCm vs rocBLAS and see what are their differences.

ROCm

AMD ROCmâ„¢ Software - GitHub Home [Moved to: https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm] (by RadeonOpenCompute)

rocBLAS

Next generation BLAS implementation for ROCm platform (by ROCm)
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ROCm rocBLAS
198 6
3,637 315
- 3.2%
0.0 9.7
4 months ago 7 days ago
Python C++
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ROCm

Posts with mentions or reviews of ROCm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-06.
  • AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Oct 2023
    Yep, did exactly that. IMO he threw a fit, even though AMD was working with him squashing bugs. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...
  • ROCm 5.7.0 Release
    1 project | /r/ROCm | 26 Sep 2023
  • ROCm Is AMD's #1 Priority, Executive Says
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Sep 2023
    Ok, I wonder what's wrong. maybe it's this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959621/error-1001-in-cl...

    Nope. Anything about this on the arch wiki? Nope

    This bug report[2] from 2021? Maybe I need to update my groups.

    [2]: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1411

        $ ls -la /dev/kfd
  • Simplifying GPU Application Development with HMM
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2023
    HMM is, I believe, a Linux feature.

    AMD added HMM support in ROCm 5.0 according to this: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/blob/develop/CHANG...

  • AMD Ryzen APU turned into a 16GB VRAM GPU and it can run Stable Diffusion
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    Woot AMD now supports APU? I sold my notebook as i hit a wall when trying rocm [1] Is there a list oft Wirkung apu's ?

    [1] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1587

  • Nvidia's CUDA Monopoly
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2023
    Last I heard he's abandoned working with AMD products.

    https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

  • Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023
    They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3].

    Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know).

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

    [2] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

    [3] https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/166980346408248934...

  • Open or closed source Nvidia driver?
    1 project | /r/linux | 9 Jul 2023
    As for rocm support on consumer devices, AMD wont even clarify what devices are supported. https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/pull/1738
  • Why Nvidia Keeps Winning: The Rise of an AI Giant
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao)

    https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-t...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0rWJhv9jU

    https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2198#issuec...

    https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/06/07/a-div...

    On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts".

    On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway".

    On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late.

    Some of what he was viewing as "the process happening in secret" was likely people doing rush patches on the latest build to accommodate him, and he comes off as berating them over it. Again, like, that stream just comes off as "mercurial manchild" not coding genius. And everyone knew the driver situation is bad, that's why there's notionally alpha for him to realize here in the first place. He's bumping into moneymakers, and getting mad about it.

  • Disable "SetTensor/CopyTensor" console logging.
    2 projects | /r/ROCm | 6 Jul 2023
    I tried to train another model using InceptionResNetV2 and the same issues happens. Also, this happens even using the model.predict() method if using the GPU. Probably this is an issue related to the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT or some mine misconfiguration. System Inormation: ArchLinux 6.1.32-1-lts - AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT - gfx1031 Opened issues: - https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/2250 - https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream/issues/2125

rocBLAS

Posts with mentions or reviews of rocBLAS. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-31.
  • Nvidia DGX GH200: The First 100 Terabyte GPU Memory System
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 May 2023
    The same is also true for https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS and https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipBLASLt although the build stack, distribution— leaves a lot to be desired, and otherwise quite unstable.
  • Whisper.cpp v1.4.0
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Apr 2023
    Full circle eh. I wonder how well it compares to just trying to use the actual Whisper models on a variety of existing Gpu capable bigger frameworks.

    I don't know much practically about how hard it would be to take the Whisper PyTorch (1 or 2?) trained models & to make good use of them elsewhere. I expect Whisper.cpp probably better caters to users, is more readily consumable.

    Fwiw, Whisper.cpp uses Nvidia's cuBLAS. There does appear to be an AMD rocm port. https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS

  • which CPU to choose?
    1 project | /r/ROCm | 15 Jun 2022
    It's not what you asked, but I felt I should point out that rocBLAS is no longer maintained for gfx803 (the architecture of the RX 570) and PyTorch depends on rocBLAS. PyTorch will work at least to some extent, but there are known bugs that may never be fixed. I've been trying to change this, but that's how things are right now.
  • Trying to get Pytorch ROCm to work on Ubuntu 20.04 with Fiji cards
    1 project | /r/ROCm | 21 Apr 2022
    The last release that officially supported gfx803 was ROCm 3.5. All testing on that hardware ceased shortly after said release, and the code paths for that architecture have been unmaintained for nearly two years. For a specific example of a problem you may encounter, see: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/rocBLAS/issues/1218
  • Compute Ecosystem of AMD GPUs
    3 projects | /r/Amd | 22 Mar 2021
  • PyTorch 1.8 adds AMD ROCm support
    3 projects | /r/Amd | 5 Mar 2021
    Although the code is still there, support for (slightly) older devices are already suffering from lack of maintainence and bugs. For instance there's a bug causing gfx803 devices to produce wrong outputs starting from mid-2020, and I'm pretty sure they're never gonna fix it.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ROCm and rocBLAS you can also consider the following projects:

tensorflow-directml - Fork of TensorFlow accelerated by DirectML

kokkos-kernels - Kokkos C++ Performance Portability Programming Ecosystem: Math Kernels - Provides BLAS, Sparse BLAS and Graph Kernels

Pytorch - Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration

HIP-CPU - An implementation of HIP that works on CPUs, across OSes.

rocm-arch - A collection of Arch Linux PKGBUILDS for the ROCm platform

AdaptiveCpp - Implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs from all vendors: The independent, community-driven compiler for C++-based heterogeneous programming models. Lets applications adapt themselves to all the hardware in the system - even at runtime!

oneAPI.jl - Julia support for the oneAPI programming toolkit.

SHARK - SHARK - High Performance Machine Learning Distribution

hipBLASLt - hipBLASLt is a library that provides general matrix-matrix operations with a flexible API and extends functionalities beyond a traditional BLAS library

llama.cpp - LLM inference in C/C++

stdgpu - stdgpu: Efficient STL-like Data Structures on the GPU