AMD's Inaugural Tech Day Ft. ROCm 7, Modular, and AMD Lab Tour (chipsandcheese.com)

At its inaugural Tech Day in Austin, AMD unveiled ROCm 7 and highlighted partner results from Modular using the MI355X accelerator, capped by a tour of AMD’s R&D labs. ROCm 7 is presented as the next evolution of AMD’s open GPU compute stack—intended to tighten the integration between drivers, compilers and ML frameworks—while Modular’s MI355X demos served as early real-world indicators of how AMD silicon performs on modern AI workloads. The lab tour underscored AMD’s emphasis on hardware–software co-design, validation and benchmarking at scale. Why it matters: ROCm 7 and validated partner hardware signal growing momentum for AMD as a viable alternative to incumbent GPU vendors in AI training and inference. For practitioners, an improved ROCm stack promises smoother framework support, better performance tuning and easier deployment of AMD accelerators in data centers and edge use cases. Modular’s MI355X results, meanwhile, hint at competitive throughput and efficiency from third-party systems built around AMD IP. Together these developments point to broader ecosystem diversity, more options for model scaling, and intensified competition that could push down costs and accelerate innovation in ML infrastructure.