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by simfree 907 days ago
Support still exists, but the card is in maintenance mode. This doesn't mean that your models that work on an MI50 today are suddenly going to stop working, or the models ran on my MI25 will cease suddenly.
2 comments

You are right, but I'm not willing to bother with that. From what I've read rocm is a mess to work with even on supported hardware, so yeah..
Install Ubuntu, install ROCm, run your model. It's really not that complicated, even with ancient MI25 cards.
That's only true if you don't mind sharing your systems with strangers in Russia, Asia, and Africa.

"Bug fixes / critical security patches will continue to be supported for the gfx906 GPUs till Q2 2024"

Worse, a lot of tooling will break before then. If you need a security patch for anything built on top of ROCm or CUDA, you often can't have an ancient version.

That's not to mention that I'd like to do new development and prototyping.

I don't do business with AMD for the same reason I don't do business with Google. They're not a reliable partner.

That the only bad actors are in Russia, Asia and Africa is becoming quite the trope.

Some very spectacular compromises by Lapsus$ aren’t originating from any of the above, but instead from the West, specifically the UK:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67663128

I think you're missing the point. Bad actors are equally distributed around the world.

The difference, however, is that, in this case, as the article points out, the bad actor is in custody.

My local law enforcement, lawyer, and judicial system are able to help out with the bad actors here and keep the problem somewhat contained.

For a bad actor in Russia or India, you quite literally have no recourse. There are literally Youtube videos (Mark Rober did a special recently) showing out-of-jurisdiction scammer and hacker shops occupying entire office buildings, and there is almost nothing we can do about it.

I'm not even going to go on a diatribe about corruption and the quality of law enforcement, since one can have different opinions. What I will point out is that US+EU have extensive treaties which allow my local law enforcement agency to cooperate closely with law enforcement agencies between US, UK, and EU.

For a bad actor in Iran or North Korea? You're not even getting diplomatic contact.

Footnote: I mention India since they're a democracy and by all standards, try to act responsibly on the global stage. They just don't happen to be in-network for various US/EU-centric international conventions.

The ROCm tooling only supports Ubuntu, Fedora and a few other enterprise distro, but it is on track to make it into the main Debian archive at which point the Debian maintainers will backport fixes as needed.

The tooling for older MI25 cards has yet to break, please avoid creating FUD on hardware you don't own.

That is the thing about AMD GPUs, nobody sane wants to own the GPUs that work with ROCm.