Alex Medick

AMD VP Anush Elangovan shares how ROCm is evolving into a developer-first platform, with MI300X performance rivaling the H200.

The Future of ROCm: AMD’s Developer-First Bet for the AI Era

At TensorWave’s Beyond CUDA 2025 Summit, Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD, laid out AMD’s vision for ROCm — and it’s refreshingly clear: developers come first.

Forget the fluff. This wasn’t a marketing pitch — it was a straight-up challenge to the AI industry to rethink what ROCm is and where it’s going.









The $64,000 Question: What’s Next for ROCm?

The question Elangovan says he was asked most at the summit:

“What the heck are we going to do about ROCm?”

His answer? “Develop

At TensorWave’s Beyond CUDA 2025 Summit, Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD, laid out AMD’s vision for ROCm — and it’s refreshingly clear: developers come first.

Forget the fluff. This wasn’t a marketing pitch — it was a straight-up challenge to the AI industry to rethink what ROCm is and where it’s going.









The $64,000 Question: What’s Next for ROCm?

The question Elangovan says he was asked most at the summit:

“What the heck are we going to do about ROCm?”

His answer? “Developers, developers, developers.”

ROCm’s future is being built for and with the open-source community. AMD knows it hasn’t always nailed the developer experience, but they’re owning it — and fixing it.


From Internal Tools to Open Ecosystem

Historically, ROCm’s tooling and documentation lagged behind. That’s changing.

 * AMD is building a robust CI/CD and open-source build system
 * They’re making internal tools available to the community
 * And they’re actively listening to developer feedback — not just pretending to

“We’re investing heavily in the developer ecosystem — so that external devs can do what internal AMD engineers do.”


ROCm Performance: MI300 vs. H200

Elangovan also shared new ROCm performance data comparing the MI300 vs. NVIDIA’s H200 on DeepSeek R1 workloads — across latency, inference, and throughput.

Full benchmarks are coming soon, but the sneak peek was clear: AMD’s MI300 is holding its own.


AMD’s New Mindset: Unlocking Your Potential

This was the biggest shift in tone: AMD isn’t positioning ROCm as a walled garden. They’re framing it as a toolkit to unlock your workloads — wherever you are, whatever you’re building.

“It’s not about what we can do on AMD. It’s about what we can unlock for you.”

It’s a subtle but powerful reframe. AMD doesn’t want to just compete with CUDA — it wants to move beyond it by offering freedom, flexibility, and performance.


Want to Build on ROCm? Just Ask.

Elangovan’s closing message was a direct call to action:

“If you want to run models, optimize performance, or deploy at scale — let us know. I’ll personally help.”

No layers of abstraction. Just support.


TL;DR

 * ROCm is shifting to a developer-first mindset
 * AMD is investing in open tooling, documentation, and ecosystem support
 * New performance data shows MI300 competing head-to-head with H200
 * AMD wants to unlock workloads, not just run them
 * Need help building on ROCm? Just reach out


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The Future of ROCm: AMD’s Developer-First Bet for the AI Era

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