AMD Publishes Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" Firmware Documentation

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack.

This MES firmware documentation follows George Hotz' Tiny Corp expressing frustrations over MES issues in their testing of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards with the ROCm compute stack. There was then calls for AMD to open-source the firmware. AMD decided to release documentation and then the source for at least the MES firmware. Today the documentation is ready and has been made publicly available without any NDAs while the MES firmware still appears to be going through its internal legal review / open-sourcing process.

Originally they were aiming for an end of May release of the MES documentation, so it's nice to see they got it out slightly ahead of schedule. The new AMD MES firmware documentation is publicly available on GPUOpen.com.

"Micro engine scheduler (MES) firmware is responsible for the scheduling of the graphics and compute work on the AMD RDNA™ 3 GPUs.

This document provides an overview of the AMD RDNA 3 scheduling architecture by describing the key scheduler firmware (MES) and hardware (Queue Manager) components that participate in the scheduling.

This document is intended to introduce the reader to the overall scheduling architecture and is not meant to serve as a programming guide."

The MES firmware documentation comes in as a 54 page PDF.

AMD is also said to be working on making other components open-source as the year progresses beyond what is already available as part of their AMD open-source Linux graphics driver stack.