Radeon's ROCm OpenCL Runtime Finally Open-Sourced

AMD has made good on their word to open-source their ROCm OpenCL stack.

AMD hadn't been contributing much to their Clover-based Gallium3D OpenCL stack in quite some time as their focus shifted to their ROCm-based compute stack with plans to eventually open up their OpenCL implementation. That implementation is now available as open-source.

Their new open OpenCL stack consists of the OpenCL runtime, the ROCm driver, LLVM and Clang changes, and the reference Khronos OpenCL ICD loader.

Details on assembling the ROCm OpenCL stack from source can be found via this Wiki page. Hopefully they get their LLVM/Clang changes upstreamed soon to reduce the burden of building this stack and working towards getting this Radeon compute stack packaged for various Linux distributions to make it easy to deploy.

Before getting too excited, it looks like their OpenCL target for now remains with Fiji/Polaris GPUs. For those with older hardware there is still the incomplete/little-maintained Clover OpenCL stack in Mesa.

My ROCm OpenCL tests from back in January showed though the v1.4 stack at the time was still behind AMDGPU-PRO in terms of compute performance. I'll have some fresh ROCm OpenCL tests coming up soon.