
AMD Launches ROCm 6.4 with Technical Upgrades, Still no Support for RDNA 4
AMD officially released ROCm 6.4, its latest open‑source GPU compute stack, bringing several under‑the‑hood improvements while still lacking official RDNA 4 support. The update improves compatibility between ROCm's user‑space libraries and the AMDKFD kernel driver, making it easier to run across a wider range of Linux kernels. AMD has also expanded its internal testing to cover more combinations of user and kernel versions, which should reduce integration headaches for HPC and AI workloads. On the framework side, ROCm 6.4 now supports PyTorch 2.5 and 2.6 out of the box, so developers can use the latest deep‑learning features without building from source. The Megatron‑LM integration adds three new fused kernels, Attention (QKV), Layer Norm, and ROPE, to speed up transformer model training by combining multiple operations into single GPU passes. Video decoding gets a boost, too, with VP9 support in both rocDecode and rocPyDecode, plus a new bitstream reader module to streamline media pipelines.
Oracle Linux 9 is now officially supported, and the Radeon PRO W7800 48 GB workstation card has been validated under ROCm. AMD also enabled CPX mode with NPS4 memory configurations, catering to advanced memory bandwidth scenarios on MI Instinct accelerators. Despite these updates, ROCm 6.4 still does not officially support RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the RX 9070 series. While community members report that the new release can run on those cards unofficially, the lack of formal enablement means RDNA 4's doubled FP16 throughput, eight times INT4 sparsity acceleration, and FP8 capabilities remain largely untapped in ROCm workflows. On Linux, consumer Radeon support is limited to just a few models, even though Windows coverage for RDNA 2 and 3 families has expanded since 2022. With AMD's "Advancing AI" event coming in June, many developers are hoping for an announcement about RDNA 4 integration. Until then, those who need guaranteed, day‑one GPU support may continue to look at alternative ecosystems.
Oracle Linux 9 is now officially supported, and the Radeon PRO W7800 48 GB workstation card has been validated under ROCm. AMD also enabled CPX mode with NPS4 memory configurations, catering to advanced memory bandwidth scenarios on MI Instinct accelerators. Despite these updates, ROCm 6.4 still does not officially support RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the RX 9070 series. While community members report that the new release can run on those cards unofficially, the lack of formal enablement means RDNA 4's doubled FP16 throughput, eight times INT4 sparsity acceleration, and FP8 capabilities remain largely untapped in ROCm workflows. On Linux, consumer Radeon support is limited to just a few models, even though Windows coverage for RDNA 2 and 3 families has expanded since 2022. With AMD's "Advancing AI" event coming in June, many developers are hoping for an announcement about RDNA 4 integration. Until then, those who need guaranteed, day‑one GPU support may continue to look at alternative ecosystems.