AMD News Archives

It looks like my report on AMD kicking off Zen 2 Linux enablement from last month is panning out. Earlier this week they posted the initial AMD Zen 2 "znver2" support for the GCC compiler and they are ending the week back in kernel space with an updated hardware monitoring driver for being able to report the CPU core temperatures of these CPUs shipping in 2019.

Mentor Graphics announced the availability today of their GNU toolchain based CodeBench Lite Edition that is a development environment intended for HPC application development that now supports targeting for AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors as well as Radeon Instinct GPUs.

Recently in our forums there has been a lot of interest in Threadripper 2 builds using ECC DDR4 memory and the impact on performance, especially now with the Threadripper 2 family being rounded out by the 2920X and 2970WX. So I set out to do some DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMM testing with Threadripper 2, but that hasn't turned out well.

With GCC 9 feature development ending in November, AMD today sent out their first patch enabling Zen 2 support in the GNU Compiler Collection via the new "znver2" target.

Six years after AMD introduced "Piledriver" as the successor to the original Bulldozer CPUs, the LLVM Clang compiler is seeing a revised scheduling model for these processors that can yield faster performance of generated code targeting this older class of AMD CPUs.

Ahead of the Zen 2 processors expected in 2019, it appears AMD developers have begun working on their Linux kernel support patches for these next-generation CPUs. In particular, it appears the flow of Linux kernel code for supporting EPYC 2 "Rome" processors has begun.

I am still finishing up work on my Linux 4.19 kernel stable benchmarks given it's been (and continues to be) a very busy month for Linux hardware testing, but of interest so far has been seeing a few EPYC performance improvements in some of the real-world workloads.

Hygon's Dhyana SoC, the facsimile of the AMD Zen microarchitecture as a result of the AMD-Chinese joint venture to begin spinning up domestic x86 chips for the Chinese data center market, will be supported by the next version of the Linux kernel.

AMD's GPUOpen group today released CodeXL 2.6 as the newest version of their GPU developer suite.

We knew AMD was planning to release the rest of the Threadripper 2 line-up in October and now we finally know the precise date.

Earlier this month AMD sent out the initial Linux graphics driver patches for "Picasso" APUs and now a new patch series today sheds some light on a new capability for these new APUs reported to be similar to current Raven Ridge hardware.

This afternoon AMD sent out their first Linux kernel patches for what might end up being a new feature for the "EPYC 2" / Zen 2 processors.

Back in June is when the Linux kernel patches appeared for the Hygon Dhyana, the new x86 processors based on AMD Zen/EPYC technology licensed by Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co for use in Chinese data-centers. While the patches have been out for months, they haven't reached the mainline kernel quite yet but that might change next cycle.

Last week AMD sent out initial support for yet-to-be-released "Picasso" APUs with the Linux AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. Today on the user-space side the support was merged for the OpenGL RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

While AMD has been sending out Linux enablement patches for the yet-to-be-released Vega 20 for months now, what didn't see any work until today was for the AMDKFD driver support so this expected 7nm Vega GPU can work with their ROCm/OpenCL compute stack.

The AMD developers maintaining their "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have pushed out their latest batch of code comprising this driver including the PAL abstraction layer, XGL Vulkan bits, and LLPC LLVM-based compiler pipeline.

Last week I reported on Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posting their new AMD GCN port to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). This GPU back-end for the widely-used GCC compiler is hoped for merging ahead of the GCC 9 stable release expected in early 2019. At this past weekend's GNU Tools Cauldron 2018 conference was a briefing by Mentor Graphics on undertaking funded by AMD.

Following weeks of leaks about these new processors targeting OEMs and system integrators, AMD today officially announced the Ryzen 3 2300X and Ryzen 5 2500X processors.

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced a new version of their open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator project that seeks to make it easier to deal with memory allocation and management when using this graphics API.

AMD's fully open-source GPU compute stack in the form of ROCm "Radeon Open eCosystem" is nearing its next milestone with OpenCL 2.0 compliance.

Earlier this week I reported on the RadeonSI Gallium3D code being tuned for AMD Zen CPUs in an attempt to deliver greater gaming performance for Ryzen processors. That work has now been merged into Mesa 18.3.

AMD has a few processor announcements this morning that are no longer under embargo.

It's arguably a bit late, but patches are now pending for optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source Linux graphics driver for the AMD Ryzen CPU microarchitecture.

Besides the Linux "k10temp" AMD CPU temperature reporting driver recently seeing support for Threadripper 2 temperature monitoring, much older Excavator (Bulldozer 4th Gen) processors will now see working CPU temperature reporting for select models.

While still waiting on the ROCm 1.9 release to happen, version 1.8.3 of the Radeon Open eCosystem stack was released for Linux systems.

The soon-to-be-released Linux 4.18.6 stable kernel will correctly report the CPU core temperatures of the new AMD Threadripper 2950X and 2990WX processors.

The good news is that the open-source AMD graphics team continues working on support for upcoming hardware, but the bad news is that it looks like their VCN video hardware might be a bit more locked down than it is now.

While I haven't posted any new Threadripper 2950X/2990WX benchmarks since the embargo expired on Monday with the Threadripper 2 Linux review and some Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, tests have continued under Linux -- as well as FreeBSD.

As expected, the CPU temperature monitoring support within the "k10temp" hwmon driver has seen the patches sent in today to be updated for the AMD Threadripper 2900 series CPU support. These patches are going into the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window but slated to be back-ported to the currently supported stable kernel series.

The latest Linux kernel patch is for supporting ECC error detection via the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) code with AMD's Great Horned Owl.

If you have already pre-ordered your AMD Threadripper 2990WX processor or just planning to be an early customer of that high-end desktop processor or the Threadripper 2950X, you may be wondering about Linux requirements from these new high-end AMD CPU offerings. Here's the gist of the Linux support state of AMD Zen+ CPUs for those wanting to get ready for Threadripper 2.

SUSE developer Martin Liška has published a patch wiring in support for AMD PMU events on the AMD Family 17h "Zen" processors.

Recently I have been posting a number of Linux laptop battery benchmarks including how the power consumption compares to Windows 10. If you are curious how these numbers play out on the desktop side and when using AMD hardware, here are some results for your viewing pleasure with a Ryzen 7 2700X and Radeon RX Vega 64 desktop system.

AMD released a minor update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler.

On top of AMDGPU improvements/features already staged for Linux 4.19, the AMD folks on Thursday sent in their seemingly last set of feature updates to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

A few days back I wrote about workarounds for getting FreeBSD running stable on AMD Ryzen via a script to adjust some of the CPU's MSRs based upon a recently-updated AMD revision guide. That script, which was making use of FreeBSD's cpucontrol utility for adjusting the bits, has now morphed into a kernel patch.

Linux 4.17 landed the initial Spectre V4 mitigation as "Speculative Store Bypass Disable" (SSBD) while primarily focused on Intel CPUs and for Linux 4.18 the SSBD code has been updated for AMD processors.

While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD.

The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2.

Overnight was the AMD press conference at Computex 2018. Here are the highlights.

The hardware monitoring "hwmon" updates have been sent in for the just-opened Linux 4.18 kernel merge window while what's interesting this time around are the k10temp driver updates for AMD CPU temperature reporting.

Support for AMD K8 "Hammer" processors including the original Athlon 64 processors and original AMD64 Opterons has been dropped from Coreboot.

AMD's Boyuan Zhang has sent out an initial set of 18 patches adding JPEG handling to the AMDGPU kernel driver for VCN "Video Core Next" as the new media encode/decode block found with Raven Ridge APUs for media decode/encode.

Ensuring your CPU microcode is kept up-to-date for Zen processors is now a little bit easier with the microcode files being added to the linux-firmware.git collection.

AMD today published their big set of patches bringing open-source Linux kernel support for the "Vega 20" graphics processor.

AMD's GPUOpen team has released Compressonator 3.0, the latest major update to this tools collection for dealing with texture and 3D model compression and optimizations for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

A bit more than one month ago I wrote about AMD developers working on updated color management support for their AMDGPU X.Org driver. Today a significantly updated patch-set is available.

Besides other promising Linux 4.17 power saving improvements, a separate fix was queued today for potentially helping AMD systems conserve power.

AMD has released a new update to their AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC).

With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend.