What’s AMD's strategy in not having consumer chip support for ROCm? It's puzzling. No way to get critical mass of development interest if the bar to entry is high.

Their plan appears to be TheRock [0]. Further open sourcing and engaging the community and leveraging that to expand support faster.

There are some recent discussions on YouTube about it [1], including one with a senior VP [2].

[0]: https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tASUo7UqNw&t=4551 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B8JOtS2Tew

I think that part of the issue is the split between CDNA for data centers [1] and RDNA for consumer products [2] with AMD only having the money to focus on the bigger data center market. There are rumors that both architectures will be merged into UDNA in the future, which will hopefully improve ROCm support, but for now it's lacking

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/cdna.html [2] https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/rdna.html

> There are rumors that both architectures will be merged into UDNA in the future

It's not rumor. It came straight from an executive: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-announce...

The strategy (seems to be) targeting data centres and focusing support efforts on the cards most likely to be used in one. There is an expectation that ROCm will work on pretty much everything but their drivers aren't good so in practice it is dicey whether it actually does.