CUDA vs ROCm

CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel computing platform and programming model for its GPUs. ROCm is AMD's open source software platform for GPU computing on AMD hardware. HIP, ROCm's C++ dialect, is designed to ease converting CUDA applications to portable C++ that can run on either vendor's GPUs. AMD's HIPIFY tool translates CUDA source to HIP, but it cannot convert calls into CUDA or third-party libraries that have no HIP equivalent.

AMD's ROCm 10.1.0 compatibility matrix lists ten Instinct accelerators, from the MI100 to the MI355X. It also lists Radeon RX 9000, RX 7000 and Radeon PRO cards and Ryzen AI processors. Instinct support is Linux only, while the Radeon and Ryzen lists add Windows 11 25H2. The same matrix validates PyTorch 2.14.0, JAX 0.11.1 and vLLM 0.29.0. PyTorch on ROCm reuses the torch.cuda interfaces, so code keeps the "cuda" device string and needs few changes, if any.

Choose ROCm only when the GPU appears in the current ROCm compatibility matrix and every framework, library and custom kernel in the stack has a ROCm build. A stack that depends on a CUDA-only library stays on NVIDIA hardware.

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Last verified October 7, 2026.