AMD open-sourced the ROCprof Trace Decoder “rocprof-trace-decoder”, a tool useful for developers targeting the AMD GPU compute stack.
Developers behind Tinygrad have long been lobbying AMD to open-source rocprof-trace-decoder as one of the few remaining blobs on the CPU side and would be helpful to them in their Tinygrad development of the AMD GPU back-end. Finally that milestone was achieved with the code being made open-source as well as the specification for the trace files.
For those that aren’t developers, rocprof-trace-decoder isn’t the most exciting project but another milestone for the open-source AMD GPU stack. Presumably they just hadn’t open-sourced it previously for lack of demand and otherwise not wasting the legal/review resources in clearing their internal processes for getting the code published.
The ROCprof Trace Decoder is described on its new GitHub as:
“The rocprof-trace-decoder library transforms wave (thread) trace binary data in .att files into a format that is consumable by tools. Wave (thread) trace is a profiling method that uses GPU hardware instrumentation to trace shader instructions that run on the GPU, capturing GPU occupancy, instruction run times, and other performance metrics.”
AMD published the ROCprof Tracer Decoder under an MIT license.
