ROCm 6.1 Released With Ubuntu 22.04.4 Support, rocDecode For AMD Video Decode

The much anticipated ROCm 6.1 has now been released! ROCm 6.1 is heavy on new features as well as expanding official operating system coverage to include the latest Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS point release.

A new component with ROCm 6.1 is the introduction of rocDecode, which is adding accelerated video decoding to the ROCm compute stack. The release notes explain of this new AMD video decode option:

"rocDecode, a new ROCm component that provides high-performance video decode support for AMD GPUs. With rocDecode, you can decode compressed video streams while keeping the resulting YUV frames in video memory. With decoded frames in video memory, you can run video post-processing using ROCm HIP, avoiding unnecessary data copies via the PCIe bus."

ROCm 6.1 also provides integration with the AMD EPYC System Management Interface (E-SMI) for this Linux library to provide user-space APIs for monitoring and control of CPU features.

The composable kernel support with ROCm 6.1 adds efficient image denoising for the AMD GPU targets of gfx1030, gfx1100, gfx1031, gfx1101, gfx1032, gfx1102, gfx1034, gfx1103, gfx1035, and gfx1036.

ROCm 6.1 also provides various minor additions to HIP, hipBLASLt, hipFFt, HIPIFY, hipSPARSELt, hipTensor, MiGraphX, MIOpen, OpenMP, and more. Notable with MIOpen is improved performance for inference and convolutions. Over on the MIGraphX side is better performance of transformer-based models and a new Torch-MIGraphX driver to use MIGraphX directly from PyTorch.

Rounding out the significant ROCm 6.1 release is further optimizations and refinements of the AMD Instinct MI300X / MI300A hardware support.

More details on today's ROCm 6.1 release via GitHub.