You might not have heard about AMD’s ROCm . It (unofficially) stands for Radeon Open Compute PlatforM—a pretty terrible acronym—and it’s pronounced “rock ’em.” This is a way for programs to take advantage of the computing power in a graphics card instead of a CPU. Think of it as a software accelerator, sort of like AMD’s version of Nvidia CUDA. And it’s about to become a lot more relevant.

PCWorld contributor Will Smith got to speak with Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President of GPU Technologies at AMD. While ROCm is mostly relevant for large-scale “big iron” enterprise applications right now, the latest changes are making it more relevant for regular Windows users.

How so? Well, the new HIP (Heterogeneous Interface for Portability) SDK. It’s a bit of special sauce that lets programs

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