What is ROCm?

2025-09-11

6 min read time

Applies to Linux and Windows

ROCm is a software stack, composed primarily of open-source software, that provides the tools for programming AMD Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), from low-level kernels to high-level end-user applications.

Specifically, ROCm provides the tools for HIP (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability), OpenCL and OpenMP. These include compilers, libraries for high-level functions, debuggers, profilers and runtimes.

ROCm components

ROCm consists of the following components. For information on the license associated with each component, see ROCm licensing.

Libraries

Machine Learning & Computer Vision

Component	Description
Composable Kernel	Provides a programming model for writing performance critical kernels for machine learning workloads across multiple architectures
MIGraphX	Graph inference engine that accelerates machine learning model inference
MIOpen	An open source deep-learning library
MIVisionX	Set of comprehensive computer vision and machine learning libraries, utilities, and applications
ROCm Performance Primitives (RPP)	Comprehensive high-performance computer vision library for AMD processors with HIP/OpenCL/CPU back-ends
rocAL	An augmentation library designed to decode and process images and videos
rocDecode	High-performance SDK for access to video decoding features on AMD GPUs
rocJPEG	Library for decoding JPG images on AMD GPUs
rocPyDecode	Provides access to rocDecode APIs in both Python and C/C++ languages

Communication

Component	Description
RCCL	Standalone library that provides multi-GPU and multi-node collective communication primitives
rocSHMEM	An intra-kernel networking library that provides GPU-centric networking through an OpenSHMEM-like interface

Math

Component	Description
half	C++ header-only library that provides an IEEE 754 conformant, 16-bit half-precision floating-point type, along with corresponding arithmetic operators, type conversions, and common mathematical functions
hipBLAS	BLAS-marshaling library that supports rocBLAS and cuBLAS backends
hipBLASLt	Provides general matrix-matrix operations with a flexible API and extends functionalities beyond traditional BLAS library
hipFFT	Fast Fourier transforms (FFT)-marshalling library that supports rocFFT or cuFFT backends
hipfort	Fortran interface library for accessing GPU Kernels
hipRAND	Ports CUDA applications that use the cuRAND library into the HIP layer
hipSOLVER	An LAPACK-marshalling library that supports rocSOLVER and cuSOLVER backends
hipSPARSE	SPARSE-marshalling library that supports rocSPARSE and cuSPARSE backends
hipSPARSELt	SPARSE-marshalling library with multiple supported backends
rocALUTION	Sparse linear algebra library for exploring fine-grained parallelism on ROCm runtime and toolchains
rocBLAS	BLAS implementation (in the HIP programming language) on the ROCm runtime and toolchains
rocFFT	Software library for computing fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) written in HIP
rocRAND	Provides functions that generate pseudorandom and quasirandom numbers
rocSOLVER	An implementation of LAPACK routines on ROCm software, implemented in the HIP programming language and optimized for AMD’s latest discrete GPUs
rocSPARSE	Exposes a common interface that provides BLAS for sparse computation implemented on ROCm runtime and toolchains (in the HIP programming language)
rocWMMA	C++ library for accelerating mixed-precision matrix multiply-accumulate (MMA) operations
Tensile	Creates benchmark-driven backend libraries for GEMMs, GEMM-like problems, and general N-dimensional tensor contractions

Primitives

Component	Description
hipCUB	Thin header-only wrapper library on top of rocPRIM or CUB that allows project porting using the CUB library to the HIP layer
hipTensor	AMD’s C++ library for accelerating tensor primitives based on the composable kernel library
rocPRIM	Header-only library for HIP parallel primitives
rocThrust	Parallel algorithm library

Tools

System Management

Component	Description
AMD SMI	System management interface to control AMD GPU settings, monitor performance, and retrieve device and process information
ROCm Data Center Tool	Simplifies administration and addresses key infrastructure challenges in AMD GPUs in cluster and data-center environments
rocminfo	Reports system information
ROCm SMI	C library for Linux that provides a user space interface for applications to monitor and control GPU applications
ROCm Validation Suite	Detects and troubleshoots common problems affecting AMD GPUs running in a high-performance computing environment

Performance

Component	Description
ROCm Bandwidth Test	Captures the performance characteristics of buffer copying and kernel read/write operations
ROCm Compute Profiler	Kernel-level profiling for machine learning and high performance computing (HPC) workloads
ROCm Systems Profiler	Comprehensive profiling and tracing of applications running on the CPU or the CPU and GPU
ROCProfiler	Profiling tool for HIP applications
ROCprofiler-SDK	Toolkit for developing analysis tools for profiling and tracing GPU compute applications. This toolkit is in beta and subject to change
ROCTracer	Intercepts runtime API calls and traces asynchronous activity

Note

ROCprof Compute Viewer is a tool for visualizing and analyzing GPU thread trace data collected using rocprofv3. Note that ROCprof Compute Viewer is in an early access state. Running production workloads is not recommended.

Development

Component	Description
HIPIFY	Translates CUDA source code into portable HIP C++
ROCm CMake	Collection of CMake modules for common build and development tasks
ROCdbgapi	ROCm debugger API library
ROCm Debugger (ROCgdb)	Source-level debugger for Linux, based on the GNU Debugger (GDB)
ROCr Debug Agent	Prints the state of all AMD GPU wavefronts that caused a queue error by sending a SIGQUIT signal to the process while the program is running

Compilers

Component	Description
HIPCC	Compiler driver utility that calls Clang or NVCC and passes the appropriate include and library options for the target compiler and HIP infrastructure
ROCm compilers	ROCm LLVM compiler infrastructure
FLANG	An out-of-tree Fortran compiler targeting LLVM

Runtimes

Component	Description
AMD Compute Language Runtime (CLR)	Contains source code for AMD’s compute language runtimes: HIP and OpenCL
HIP	AMD’s GPU programming language extension and the GPU runtime
ROCR-Runtime	User-mode API interfaces and libraries necessary for host applications to launch compute kernels on available HSA ROCm kernel agents