AMD News Archives

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.

AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver.

With the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel there is the long-awaited discrete GPU support in good shape at least for hardware like Polaris and Fiji. While the latest and greatest AMD GPUs are the Vega family, more work has been needed for AMDKFD support. Unfortunately those Vega changes didn't make it in for Linux 4.17, but those patches are now available.

A long available tool has been AMD's ROCm HIP that allows converting CUDA code to portable C++ code that in turn can be executed on Radeon GPUs. There is now work on getting the upstream LLVM Clang compiler's CUDA toolchain support to also support HIP.

Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks.

Last week was the controversial publishing of the "AMD Flaws" CPU vulnerabilities for Ryzen and EPYC processors. AMD has now issued their first public update on the matter and have said they will be issuing PSP firmware and BIOS updates for mitigation.

The AMD developers working on their official cross-platform "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver have updated their open-source code-base for Linux users.

Just two months after the big Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed, Israeli security researchers have published 13 security vulnerabilities claiming to affect AMD Ryzen and EPYC product lines.

Last year AMD's GPUOpen group posted the Vulkan Memory Allocator while coming soon is version 2.0 of this code-base.

Sadly right now with the highly-anticipated Vega+Zen Raven Ridge desktop APUs is in fairly rough shape with some hangs, display corruption, etc. Fortunately it looks like Linux 4.17 support will be in better shape.

The Sun4i DRM driver work has been progressing a lot since its mainline introduction two years ago with Linux 4.7. With the Linux 4.17 cycle, the A83T SoC will have initial HDMI output support.

AMD is taking their Zen microarchitecture to the embedded space now with the announcement of the AMD Launches EPYC Embedded 3000 and Ryzen Embedded V1000 series.

One of the discussion items in the forums this week was about the video memory allowance for the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge APUs as well as efficiences or inefficiencies around the TTM memory manager as used by the AMDGPU kernel driver. Here are some vRAM size tests with the Ryzen 3 2200G.

With my launch testing of the Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G there were some stability issues to report and some hangs within games and mode-setting issues. It appears those issues are exacerbated with some motherboards: the past few days with two different AMD B350 motherboards have been a real pain getting the current AMDGPU driver stack working -- and even Linux 4.17 AMDGPU WIP code -- on either of these Raven Ridge APUs.

Tomorrow I will be posting our initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APUs with the Zen CPU cores plus Vega graphics.

For those that haven't been paying attention or have lost track of time, the first two Raven Ridge desktop APUs are expected to become available tomorrow with their Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics.

With more than one hundred different benchmarks, here are some fresh tests of the Core i9 7980XE and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X boxes when running on the Linux 4.15.2 stable kernel atop a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

AOCC 1.1 is the second public release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler designed for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors.

While the just-released Linux 4.15 kernel brings AMD Zen CPU temperature reporting support for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors, an oversight in the k10temp driver code is yielding an incorrect temperature for the Threadripper 1900X.

For those planning to pick up a Raven Ridge laptop or the forthcoming desktop APUs, the Mesa driver now has patches for enabling H.265/HEVC video encode support for VCN 1.0 on Raven hardware.

For those curious about the performance impact of the Retpoline patches as found in the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks on an assortment of old and new AMD Linux systems.

While Intel announced their new CPUs with Radeon Vega M graphics, AMD had a host of announcements on their own for getting CES 2018 started with some excitement.

With the plethora of software security updates coming out over the past few days in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre disclosure, released by SUSE was a Family 17h "Zen" CPU microcode update that we have yet to see elsewhere... It claims to disables branch prediction, but I've confirmed with AMD that is not actually the case.

While all eyes have been on Intel this week with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, a disclosure was publicly made this week surrounding AMD's PSP Secure Processor in an unrelated security bulletin.

Right now with the big mysterious security vulnerability causing the rush of the x86 Page Table Isolation work that landed in the Linux kernel days ago, it's believed to be a problem only affecting Intel CPUs. But at least for now the mainline kernel is still treating AMD CPUs as "insecure" and is too taking a performance hit.

AMD/Radeon had a stellar 2017 for Linux most notably with delivering working Radeon RX Vega open-source driver support at launch, AMDGPU DC finally being merged to the mainline Linux kernel, and the official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver now being open-source. Besides never-ending performance tuning, there's really just one major feature/area where the Radeon Linux graphics driver support is missing.

AMD developers working on the newly open-sourced AMDVLK Vulkan driver have pushed out their first post-release code update synced against the latest changes in their internal AMD driver tree.

Here's a look at our most-viewed original AMD/Radeon Linux and open-source news stories of 2017.

More AMDKFD changes are being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window with this being the kernel HSA driver for ROCm support, etc.

Endless Mobile, the company behind the Linux-based Flatpak-using Endless OS and that has sold several different low-cost computers around the world, is looking forward to AMDGPU DC.

Following yesterday's excitement around the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver as well as word of AMD open-sourcing their Linux driver and making other Linux driver changes, AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of a new version of Radeon GPU Profiler.

With the latest AGESA update for Ryzen-based systems, AMD is reportedly allowing the Platform Security Processor (PSP) to be disabled. The AMD PSP akin to Intel's Management Engine.

For those who already picked up a Raven Ridge laptop or looking to when more of these Zen+Vega devices surface in the weeks ahead, the Raven Ridge firmware is now living within linux-firmware.git.

AMD's embargo has just expired over the name of their new driver.

Marek has volleyed onto the Mesa mailing list a set of patches providing RadeonSI with a "huge cleanup" for this Gallium3D OpenGL driver used by Radeon HD 7000 series "GCN" / "Southern Islands" graphics cards and newer.

A few of you within the forums have talked of regressions and other bugs when trying out the new AMDGPU DC display stack in the Linux 4.15 kernel, particularly on pre-Vega GPUs where it's disabled by default. The good news is that more fixes are on the way.

AMD has sent out 14 new patches today for the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver in material that should be targeting Linux 4.16.

AMD's GPUOpen team has announced the release of Compressonator 2.7, the newest version of their tools for dealing with compressed assets and for testing the impact of different compression techniques.

As a flashback to the past, hitting the LLVM Git/SVN code today were improvements for those still running with processors supporting AMD's 3DNow! extensions.

While the Radeon RX Vega discrete graphics cards are making use of the ultra-fast HBM2 memory, it appears the newly-launched AMD "Raven Ridge" APU featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics is not using HBM2 memory.

Of the many changes coming for Linux 4.15, as detailed this weekend Radeon GPU and AMD CPU customers have a lot to be thankful for with this new kernel update currently in development. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Linux 4.15 development kernel using an AMD EPYC 7601 32-core / 64-thread setup.

If you have been wanting to build a new system before the end of the year, AMD Ryzen CPU prices -- including the high-end Threadripper -- have been dropping in recent days in at least the US and EU.

Linux 4.15 is shaping up to be a massive kernel release and we are just half-way through its merge window period. But for AMD Linux users especially, the 4.15 kernel release is going to be rocking.

The sound driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel and includes finally supporting AMD Stoney Ridge hardware.

AMD has unveiled the Radeon Open eCosystem platform (ROCm) 1.7 release as part of their wares at this week's Supercomputing 17 (SC17) conference in Denver.

We've been expecting it to happen for weeks while indeed the hwmon pull request was indeed sent in today exposing AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC temperature reporting on Linux.

On Monday Intel announced their upcoming CPU with integrated AMD Vega-class graphics backed by HBM2 memory, on Tuesday Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) head Raja Koduri announced he would be resigning from the company, and now today it's announced he is joining Intel.