AMD Begins Providing PowerPC Builds Of Their "AOMP" GPU Compiler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Begins Providing PowerPC Builds Of Their "AOMP" GPU Compiler

AOMP is the AMD GPU compiler for OpenMP and HIP support on GPUs as part of Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0). Now they have begun providing PowerPC 64-bit LE builds of AOMP as part of allowing Radeon GPU compute to happen on POWER9 systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-AOMP-On-POWER

[ezst036]

It's great that AMD has provided this. It shows their commitment to the whole open source eco system. Sure, they might or probably have a customer requesting this. But they still chose to open it up.

AMD sometimes takes flak, perhaps much of it justified, when they are slower to market with x feature or even some feature that must now be disabled for several months after being enabled.

But it's easy to overlook things like this because most of us probably dont have a POWER9 and it wont affect us personally.

[Hugh]

1. As far as I can tell, IBM has deep relationships with Nvidia for GPU computing. I think that they even push a faster-than-PCIe bus for that. What would make customers try AMD?

2. I wish I understood how to make ROCm or whatever work on my x86-64 distros of choice. That would seem much easier for AMD. Maybe only better documentation is required.