TLDR: ROCM is AMD's variant for general purpose compute on GPUs, like CUDA is for NVIDIA.

OpenAI being for profit.

I use ROCM extensively (I write, design and train my own AIs/LLMs) and it's annoying of an acronym, especially in command lines:

--rocm-6.6.7.2-dev1  --cuda

But I figure it's a four letter acronym to match "CUDA".

I also pronounce it "Rock'em" in verbal versus "Koo'dah" (Barracuda).

Everything is about marketing and goodwill. You can just say something has "blast processing" and fail to elaborate.