My first impressions on ROCm and Strix Halo

Here I'll share my first impressions with ROCm and Strix Halo and how I've set up everything.

128GB efficiently shared between the CPU and GPU.

I'm used to working with Ubuntu, so I stuck with it in the supported 24.04 LTS version, and just followed the official installation instructions.

It seems that things wouldn't work without a BIOS update: PyTorch was unable to find the GPU. This was easily done on the BIOS settings: it was able to connect to my Wifi network and download it automatically.

Also on the BIOS settings, you might need to make sure you set the reserved video memory to a low value and let the memory be shared between the CPU and GPU using the GTT. The reserved memory can be as low as 512MB.

Implications:

The CPU is not able to use the GPU reserved memory.

The GPU can use the total of Reserved + GTT, but utilizing both simultaneously can be less efficient than a single large GTT pool due to fragmentation and addressing overhead.

Some legacy games or software sadly might see the GPU memory as 512 MB and refuse to work, this has not happened to me so far though.

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