New AMDGPU Firmware Published For Upcoming Radeon GPUs

There's been talk of new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards this quarter and adding some weight to that is AMD publishing several new firmware files for different intellectual property blocks of IP versions previously not seeing firmware binaries in the linux-firmware.git repository.

While AMD begins publishing their open-source Linux graphics driver code months in advance of new GPU launches, when it comes to the necessary firmware binaries needed for operation with the Linux driver stack they tend to do that not until just around launch-time... Sometimes shortly before and other times right at launch or slightly later. With the new firmware drop this week, it looks like AMD has rolled out the new firmware pieces a bit early.

Making their debut in linux-firmware.git for the first time is firmware supporting the AMD graphics IP blocks of SMU 13.0.10, SDMA 6.0.3, PSP 13.0.10, and GC 11.0.3.

These firmware files are for some new RDNA3 hardware but beyond that AMD's block-by-block versioning these days doesn't reveal much about the commercialized product. It's possible these new revisions are for the rumored Radeon RX 7700/7800 series expanded family or other unannounced consumer/workstation GPU hardware. With GC 11.0.3, it's at least a given of the GFX11 (RDNA3) and not of the GFX9/CDNA accelerator lineage. At least for the current discrete and mobile RDNA3 hardware, everything already released is supported by the firmware already found in the tree.

In any event, it's nice seeing these firmware files out early so it allows time for Linux distribution vendors to package up the latest linux-firmware files and get them out to users. Those wanting the latest Linux firmware files can continue to fetch them from linux-firmware.git.