It Turns Out AMDGPU KFD Compute Support Can Work On 64-bit ARM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It Turns Out AMDGPU KFD Compute Support Can Work On 64-bit ARM

Up to now the AMDKFD kernel driver needed for running the ROCm user-space has only worked on x86_64 CPUs, but with some simple changes, it turns out this Radeon compute kernel driver can work on 64-bit ARM as well...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARM64-AMDKFD-HSA-Compute

[cbxbiker61]

Nice.

It would be great if we could get a nice little aarch64 SBC with radeon graphics. It would be wonderful to have SBC's with a reliable open source stack. Now that AMD is firing on all cylinders, maybe they will move forward with Arm chips for the low-end...here's hoping anyway. My wishlist would be an octa-core A7X/A5X big-little with Radeon graphics.

[Guest]

Nice.

It would be great if we could get a nice little aarch64 SBC with radeon graphics. It would be wonderful to have SBC's with a reliable open source stack. Now that AMD is firing on all cylinders, maybe they will move forward with Arm chips for the low-end...here's hoping anyway. My wishlist would be an octa-core A7X/A5X big-little with Radeon graphics.

You can get Intel SBCs which have really good open source drivers. Especially for GPUs.

[Guest]

Hm, I wonder if this is for servers? New mobile device with ARM CPU and AMD GPU? Or just a personal experiment?

[boxie]

So... that's big.LITTLE.^huge??

also reminds me of that line from Aladdin - "Phenominal GPU power, itty bitty general compute space" (ok, I might be paraphrasing there)

[enihcam]

This is a great NEWS. AMD now has a chance to compete with NVIDIA in embedded AI computing.

[ms178]

Unfortunately their DC stack (Display Code) relies on x86-64 specific FP code. There were some discussions on the mailing list on that matter but it seems that it is not a current priority to alter this because it would be hard to re-validate it if changed. I wonder why this design decision has been made in the first place, at least at that time I'd assume that having a ISA agnostic driver stack would have been nice to have to keep the door open for future ARM developments. Maybe the lack of resources at that time meant to postpone this code refactoring into the future?

[tuxd3v]

Good news,
Probably this could workout for ARM servers running GPU Computing..
AMD will put some competition to Nvidia here. and ARM will be not only dependent of Nvidia for that tasks.. so they also get better position to negotiate with NVidia..

AMD will also get ARM help with the stack, which is great!

its a win-win, since users will have more apetite for AMD, but we need yet to see it materializing..

[agd5f]

Unfortunately their DC stack (Display Code) relies on x86-64 specific FP code.

It's not x86 specific. It's just FP and the FP code is only required for Raven APUs which are tied to x86 anyway and that code only gets enabled on platforms which support it.

[schmidtbag]

This is great. This is the sort of stuff that makes Linux so portable