AMD SFH Driver To Land With Linux 5.11 For Better Ryzen Laptop Handling In 2021

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD SFH Driver To Land With Linux 5.11 For Better Ryzen Laptop Handling In 2021

It was sadly too late for squeezing into the current Linux 5.10 merge window but it looks like for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH" driver will make its long awaited debut...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-SFH-For-Linux-5.11

[Jumbotron]

Well...better late than never I suppose. Just in time for AMD's next rollout in Chromebooks and for the ARM apocalypse that is coming in the entire consumer space once Apple unveils their ARM based Macbook next month.

What with Intel now producing a decent (VERY) decent iGPU and next year dGPU and the ARM apocalypse in the consumer space all the way from IoT to Desktops, I think, sadly as I have been an AMD fan boi since 1989 when I bought my first AMD based laptop, that AMD will be squeezed to just being a semi-custom SoC designer for game consoles and a designer of high end HPC and Supercomputing CPU's and GPU's. I think AMD's days in the cheap consumer space are numbered.

Why? Intel now is a full stack hardware and software design house. They have CPU's, NPU's, FPGA's, DSP's and now GPU's what with Intel poaching half of all AMD's engineers of note since 2017. Intel also designs the industries leading compilers and API's. Only they could have ressurected OpenCL like they have.

Nvidia is in a similar shape. They are also now a full stack hardware and software design house, even BEFORE they purchased ARM. Now they are even more powerful and influential than Intel by the very fact that they OWNED the HPC and Supercomputing world with GPU's before their purchase of ARM. Now with ARM Nvidia will quite literally be in every single electronic device known to man and used by mankind on the entire farking planet.

AMD ?? Perenial also-ran. Plucky up and comer. Every decade makes some honest to god big jump in performance and/or design paradigm. Only to fall away from either bad execution or the engineers who made said paradigm leap get poached by Intel, Nvidia or Apple. Or Tesla...for Christ's sake.

The "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" reality for AMD will finally come home to roost this decade. By 2030, AMD will be relegated to high end HPC and custom SoCs for game consoles and Las Vegas style game machines like slot machines. Their consumer biz like in PC's will wither between Intel's marketing of their decent GPU's and ARM's onslaught into the Windows PC space as they all chase after Apple's move to all ARM in everything.

[CommunityMember]

.... that AMD will be squeezed to just being a semi-custom SoC designer for game consoles and a designer of high end HPC and Supercomputing CPU's and GPU's. I think AMD's days in the cheap consumer space are numbered

Cheap, of course, is in the eye of the buyer, but presuming AMD continues to have success in the HPC/data science market with top performing solution it should be possible for them to continue to take those designs and use lower tile counts for a consumer product with little additional engineering effort. Of course, AMD also has an architectural license for ARM64 if they choose to get into that space.

[Jumbotron]

Su's an IBM gal. Big Iron. There's no margin in ARM for a company without deep pockets or a complete hardware/software/compiler/API stack. Jim Keller started the ARM (K12) AMD effort. Su killed it with extreme prejudice and for good reason. Su has made the explicit decision and she has actually stated this, that the key to AMD is x86. They'll use ARM as they have now. As a security chip add on or even an embedded NPU (Neural Net Processor) offload from a Zen x86 CPU.

[finalzone]

The missing piece for AMD powered convertible laptop is in. Time to build and test it.