Watch: AMD talks ROCm and how it’s a game-changer for Radeon PCs
You may not have heard of AMD’s ROCM. It represents (unofficially) the Radeon Open calculation platform – a fairly terrible acronym – and it is pronounced “Rock ‘Em”. It is a way for programs to take advantage of the computing power in a graphics card instead of a CPU. Consider it as a software accelerator, much like the NVIDIA Cuda AMD version. And it is about to become much more relevant.
PCworld’s contributor Will Smith was able to speak with Andrej Zdravkovic, Vice-President Director of GPU technologies at AMD. Although ROCM is mainly relevant for large -scale business applications at the moment, the latest modifications make it more relevant to regular Windows users.
How so? Well, the new hip SDK (heterogeneous interface for portability). It is a little special sauce that allows programs designed to use Cuda and similar systems exploit the power of ROCM to take advantage of Radeon graphics cards. And that has the potential to change huge game. Basically, any local program that needs additional power – AI applications to the processing of files and beyond – can take advantage of it, with only small adjustments necessary to obtain the existing operational code in most cases.
Discover the full video interview above for the technical and technical residents. And for deeper dives in the latest PC technology, be sure to subscribe to PCworld and the complete Nerd network on YouTube.
