AMD News Archives

By now you've likely seen the fantastic performance out of AMD's new "Rome" 7002 series processors. The performance is phenomenal and generally blowing well past Intel's Xeon Cascade Lake processors. So that's all good and it can get even better outside of performance: I asked AMD about the prospects of Coreboot / open-source BIOS support and got a surprising response.

Coinciding with yesterday's glorious AMD EPYC "Rome" 7002 series CPU launch, AMD's software folks released AOCC 2.0 as their LLVM/Clang-based compiler optimized for Zen processors. AOCC 2.0 brings optimized compiler support now for Zen 2 processors not just only the EPYC 7002 line-up but also the Ryzen 3000 series consumer processors.

For those wondering what the SMT performance impact is for new Zen 2 processors, here are some tests done using a Ryzen 9 3900X with Ubuntu Linux when testing at the default 12-core / 24-threads and then again when disabling SMT to look at just the twelve physical cores.

Patches are now queued into the Linux kernel's hwmon subsystem staging area that allow the AMD "k10temp" driver to support the Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processors.

With yesterday's Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, some suggested that the Linux performance could have been better if using a Linux 5.x kernel. Well, here are some benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with its Linux 4.18 kernel compared to Linux 5.2 stable as well as the brand new Linux 5.3 development kernel.

While AMD developers published their "Znver2" compiler patches for Zen 2 originally back in November, months ahead of the recent Ryzen 3000 series launch, this compiler support was incomplete as it re-used the existing scheduler model and costs table of Znver1. Now though one of SUSE's compiler experts who often works in cooperation with AMD has published the new Znver2 scheduler model and costs table for Zen 2.

For those in the market for an AMD X570 high-end motherboard for use with the new Zen 2 processors, the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO was one of the boards sent out as part of the reviewer's kit and it's been working out quite well.

Back in April I wrote about Coreboot seeing AMD Picasso APU enablement work as the first Zen/Ryzen processor target being handled by this open-source BIOS alternative. It now looks like that Picasso support is all squared away and ready for use by future AMD-powered Google Chromebooks.

AMD has just alerted us that they have released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners that takes care of the issue around booting newer Linux distributions on the new Zen 2 processors.

AMD Zen 2 CPUs support ACPI's Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) for tuning the system to energy and/or performance requirements. AMD has now published a new CPUfreq driver for handling their CPPC implementation and the new controls found with their new processors.

As outlined yesterday, AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors are very fast but having issues booting newer Linux distributions. The exact issue causing that boot issue on 2019 Linux distribution releases doesn't appear to be firmly resolved yet but some are believing it is an RdRand instruction issue on these newer processors manifested by systemd.

Leading up to today's Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series launch it was looking like there wouldn't be any support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for this community-maintained open-source implementation. But the open-source developers at Valve managed to not only deliver Navi 10 support but also Navi 12 and Navi 14 are also supported with this new Mesa 19.2 code.

A new security vulnerability has been made public over AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) having insecure cryptographic implementations. Fortunately, this AMD SEV issue is addressed by a firmware update.

AMD has lost one of their leading LLVM compiler developers as well as serving as a Vulkan/SPIR-V expert with being involved in those Khronos specifications.

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG.

During the AMD Zen 2 + RDNA launch event they highlighted some of the new instructions to find with the Zen 2 processor but there is at least one more.

AMD today announced a new licensing deal with Samsung around low-power, high-performance graphics technologies.

While there are the Debian/RPM packages offered of the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) stack for Linux users on supported distributions, the new "ROCm Enablement Tool" could assist in setting up this GPU compute stack on supported Linux distributions and elsewhere.

At Computex today AMD announced their initial 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor line-up launching on 7 July along with the Radeon RX 5700 series.

AMD Raven Ridge APUs have been out for more than one year now and at least under Linux can still be quite problematic depending upon the particular motherboard BIOS and other factors. Fortunately, while Raven 2 and Picasso APU support is appearing to be in better shape, the AMD open-source developers haven't forgot about these problematic Raven 1 systems.

With the recent release of the GCC 9 stable compiler there is the initial "AMD GCN" GPU target/back-end merged. However, for this GNU Compiler Collection release the AMD GCN target isn't all that useful but continued work on it gives us hope of seeing it in good shape for next year's GCC 10 release.

With the Linux 5.2 kernel an AMD-supplied change by AMDGPU developer Christian König allows for supporting peer-to-peer DMA between any devices on AMD Zen systems.

For those interested in compiler optimization/tuning with AMD Ryzen Threadripper hardware, here are some follow-up benchmarks to Tuesday's GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ Compiler Performance On AMD Threadripper, Intel Core i9.

The notable change with the "EDAC" changes for Linux 5.2 comes down to the "Zen 2" support for the new AMD EPYC processors launching later this year.

Systemd developers are sounding the alarms that some AMD processors might lose randomness (yielding non-random data) via the RdRand instruction following a suspend/resume alarm. However, initial indications don't appear for this to be some glaring widespread issue and might be limited to the older AMD CPUs and/or BIOS/motherboard combination.

AMD and Cray announced today they won a contract to provide the US Department of Energy with the hardware to the "Frontier" supercomputer that is expected to go online in 2021 and deliver 1.5 exaflops of compute power.

Linux 5.2 is certainly going to be a big kernel release... On top of many new features and other changes, AMD Ryzen laptops will be better supported by this kernel update to be released as stable around July.

Confirming recent leaks, AMD today announced the Ryzen 7 2700X Gold Edition and Radeon VII Gold Edition products in marking the 50th anniversary of Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded R1000 series with the inaugural R1505G and R1606G SoCs.

Last week I passed along some initial benchmark results after finding Intel Cascade Lake offering up some performance improvements when using the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel. The exciting news is this doesn't appear to be Cascadelake-specific or even Intel specific as with the Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server I am also seeing some nice performance improvements in the same benchmarks.

While we are quite looking forward to Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) desktop processors this summer, for those in the market for AMD mobile processors in business notebooks/laptops, AMD today announced the 2nd Gen Ryzen PRO mobile processors.

AMD developers continue working out the open-source enablement bits for Linux to handle the upcoming Zen 2 processors.

While it didn't make it in time for the soon to be released LLVM 8.0, the latest LLVM/Clang 9.0 development code has just added support for the Zen 2 "znver2" processors.

For those making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization for secure VMs running on AMD EPYC platforms, the firmware bits required for supporting SEV have now been added to the linux-firmware.git tree to allow for easier updating to this virtualization security feature.

If you are in the market for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC heatsink that fits within 4U height requirements, the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is still easily the best option available. I'm now running the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 in five different EPYC/Threadripper systems in the racks and they work out splendid.

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, discrete Radeon graphics cards based on Vega 10 and newer will have fine-grained controls over what PowerPlay power management features are enabled and the ability to toggle them at run-time.

While Monday was the Intel keynote at CES 2019, this morning AMD took the spotlight with Lisa Su's keynote in Las Vegas.

Ahead of the big AMD keynote on Tuesday, AMD kicked off CES week today by announcing the Ryzen 3000 Series Mobile Processors.

After looking yesterday at the most popular Intel Linux news of 2018, the tables have turned and this article is looking at the most popular AMD/Radeon news for the year on Phoronix.

When AMD Zen CPUs originally rolled out, the ability to monitor the CPU core temperatures under Linux didn't roll out until months later. Fortunately, for Zen 2 the AMD Linux CPU temperature driver looks like it will be ready in time.

With CPU microcode updates having become increasingly important over the past year in light of the Spectre vulnerabilities and other security updates, the Linux 4.21 kernel is bringing several improvements to the AMD CPU microcode update handling.

The AMD Platform QoS support talked about a few months ago on Phoronix is landing for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel. While not officially confirmed, this Quality of Service system resource work appears almost surely for the next-generation 7nm EPYC processors coming out in the months ahead.

It's too late to get as a stocking stuffer, but AMD announced today that two more Athlon 200 series parts with two Zen cores and Vega 3 graphics.

Coming to the next version of the Linux kernel is new sound driver support for the AMD ACP3x (Audio Co-Processor 3.x).

A big serving of AMD firmware/microcode updates landed on Friday in the linux-firmware.git canonical tree for both AMD Zen processors and Radeon graphics processors.

It looks like AMD could be announcing Vega II as new 7nm Vega GPUs soon complementing the recently announced Vega 20 Radeon Instinct MI50 / MI60 accelerators.

AMD has just dropped a new Family 17h "Zen" microcode file for Linux users.

While Stoney Ridge was AMD's 2016 APU platform with Excavator CPU cores and GCN 1.2 graphics, the Linux support in some regards is still being settled in some areas.

It looks like the mainline Linux 4.20 kernel within a few days will be playing nicely on more AMD hardware. In particular, the Raven Ridge Zen+Vega APUs that have been rather troublesome depending upon the BIOS/motherboard since their launch almost one year ago.

Earlier this month AMD quietly released a new version of their Optimizing C/C++ compiler in the form of AOCC 1.3. This new compiler release has more Zen tuning to try to squeeze even more performance out of Ryzen/EPYC systems when using their LLVM-based compiler.