AMD is hosting an AI Day out in San Francisco today and as part of those festivities today they announced the ROCm Core SDK 7.9 SDK paired with TheRock build and release infrastructure system they have been crafting.
Yes, this new ROCm Core SDK version is v7.9… I was left scratching my head as well and wondering if I was in coma some months or the like since last I recalled was the ROCm 7.0 series. It turns out there is an intentional discontinuity for this ROCm Core SDK 7.9 release and is intended to serve as a “technology preview” stream through mid-2026… At that point these 7.9-and-later versions will culminate with the new production stream, presumably ROCm 8.0?
The official explanation of the ROCm Core SDK 7.9 version in the official documentation puts it as:
“ROCm 7.9.0 introduces a versioning discontinuity following the previous 7.0 releases. Versions 7.0 through 7.8 are reserved for production stream ROCm releases, while versions 7.9 and later represent the technology preview release stream. Both streams share a largely similar code base but differ in their build systems. These differences include the CMake configuration, operating system package dependencies, and integration of AMD GPU driver components.
Maintaining parallel release streams allows users ample time to evaluate and adopt the new build system and dependency changes. The technology preview stream is planned to continue through mid‑2026, after which it will replace the current production stream.”
Making use of TheRock as the HIP/ROCm build system is the biggest user/developer-facing change of ROCm Core SDK 7.9. TheRock has also helped users build out ROCm/HIP for non-officially supported Radeon GPUs in recent months.
This blog post out today goes into more detail on this ROCm 7.9 release and TheRock integration moving forward.
“TheRock enables ROCm itself to be built both faster and more reliably. The examples above are small demonstrations of how TheRock can help end-users get started with ROCm. More comprehensively, TheRock will help enable build and test support for the Instinct and Radeon catalogue, as outlined in the project roadmap. Project initiatives include working with downstream projects like PyTorch, JAX, llama.cpp, and more to bring this software to more users. The main starting point to explore these features is the project’s README page.”
More details too via rocm.docs.amd.com.
