AMD News Archives

Phoronix reader Thomas Frech has shared with us another article on Monero/XMR cryptocurrency mining performance with AMD Threadripper. Thsi follows his recent guest posts of mining Ethereum with Threadrippers and AMD Vega GPUs, Ethereum and Monero mining on the same systems, and the AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 crypto mining boost.

Linux 4.15 will be exciting for AMD Zen systems not only for working temperature reporting (finally) being in place for Ryzen/EPYC, but AMD EPYC CPUs should also benefit from a scheduler topology improvement.

Building off an earlier update in DRM-Next of upstreaming more AMDKFD changes for Linux 4.15, a second batch of feature work was proposed today for merging into DRM-Next.

As SUSE has been working in conjunction with AMD on more tuning for AMD Zen CPUs under the GCC compiler, here are some fresh benchmarks of the GCC 8 compiler code being tested on an AMD EPYC system.

Two weeks ago AMD released an AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 driver intended for cryptocurrency mining systems while now that v17.40 series driver has been promoted to being their general purpose stable Linux hybrid driver.

AMD's Linux team working on the AMDGPU DC display code sent out a set of 29 more patches this week.

One area where AMD Ryzen users have encountered Linux issues with virtualization is when trying to setup pass-through support for a graphics card to allow the virtual machine direct access to the GPU. When NPT (Nested Page Tables) are enabled, performance can become severely degraded.

Following AMD on Twitter teasing new Ryzen announcements the past few days, today is expected to be the launch day for the new Ryzen Mobile hardware up to now known as "Raven Ridge".

As further sign of Feral Interactive continuing to pursue Vulkan for their Linux games, a Feral developer today posted a patch for implementing the brand new AMD_shader_info extension for the RADV Mesa driver.

The AMDGPU DC display code has a final batch of feature updates that were sent in this weekend for DRM-Next staging and is the last set besides fixes for the "DC" code for the 4.15 target.

ZenStates is an independent effort to offer P-States-based overclocking from the Linux desktop of AMD Ryzen processors and other tuning.

Adding to the excitement of Linux 4.15, AMD has queued some more changes that were sent in today for DRM-Next.

AMD's GPUOpen initiative has put out a new release of their Windows and Linux supported Radeon GPU Profiler program for profiling Vulkan (and Direct3D 12) games.

The AMDKFD kernel driver that is a component of HSA support on Linux for Radeon GPUs is seeing more upstreaming work in Linux 4.15, but only for older APUs.

AMD this week has quietly released an updated AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 hybrid driver targeting mining and GPGPU compute Linux customers.

Recently making waves in our forums was talk of a kernel patch to address a case where the AMD CPB (Core Performance Boost) isn't being exposed by Ryzen processors. Here's more details on that and some benchmarks.

AMD has announced the world's first "Raven Ridge" APU with this notebook being powered by Ryzen 5 CPU cores paired with Vega graphics.

A few days back I initially wrote about a SUSE developer working on Zen tuning patches for GCC. That work has continued with more compiler patches coming for optimizing the GNU's compiler for Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processors.

Yesterday a new batch of AMD EPYC processors arrived for testing at Phoronix.

Phoronix reader Thomas Frech has shared with us an article he wrote about his new Ethereum mining work on two systems using AMD Threadripper processors and a total four Radeon RX Vega 64 GPUs under Linux.

AMD is currently looking to hire more LLVM compiler engineers to work on their ROCm open-source compute stack.

Alex Deucher has submitted the initial AMD Direct Rendering Manager updates for pulling into DRM-Next that in turn will hit the Linux 4.15 kernel.

It looks like the upstream Linux 4.14 kernel may end up playing nicely with the ROCm OpenCL compute stack, if you are on a Kaveri or Carrizo system.

While not particularly relevant to Linux gamers at this point in time, AMD is dropping their CrossFire branding in favor of just calling it their mGPU technology.

If you want CPU temperature monitoring to work under Linux for your Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC processor(s), it's working on hwmon-next.

Motherboard vendors have begun pushing out BIOS updates for Ryzen motherboards using the AMD AGESA 1.0.0.6b revision and it's reported that it does resolve the "Performance Marginality Problem" affecting early Ryzen Linux customers.

The big undertaking of the rewriting/modernizing of the AMDGPU DRM driver's display code stack has out now another 28 patches.

For the many of you Linux users that have been desiring an AMD laptop, things could get interesting with Lenovo having just announced the ThinkPad A-Series.

The crypto subsystem updates have been pulled in for the Linux 4.14 kernel and it includes more complete AMD Secure Processor support, among other changes.

With AMD a few days ago having landed an updated scheduler model for Zen CPUs within LLVM, I ran some fresh compiler benchmarks to see how the performance compares.

While the Ryzen CPUs have been available for a few months now and the higher-wattage Threadripper and EPYC processors are now available too, the Linux thermal driver remains missing in action and it's looking less likely that it will materialize for Linux 4.14.

Seventy-seven new patches were posted today for the AMDGPU DC (formerly DAL) display code that reworks around six thousand lines of this massive codebase.

With the soon-to-be-released LLVM 5.0 there is the initial AMD Zen scheduler model for the compiler to benefit Ryzen / EPYC processors. But now already hitting the LLVM development code for LLVM 6.0 is a revised scheduler model.

Following the rumors of an eight-core / sixteen-thread Threadripper, the 1900X is now officially available beginning today.

One of the unique test requests coming in as part of our Threadripper on Linux testing is to see how well the LLVMpipe and OpenSWR CPU-based OpenGL implementations within Mesa perform for this 16 core / 32 thread single-socket processor. Here are those results.

While there are an array of interesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux benchmarks in this morning's review, after hitting a 36 second Linux kernel compilation time with this 16 core / 32 thread processor, I spent this afternoon seeing what I was getting for some other compile times of popular programs.

For those curious about the performance impact of the different CPUFreq governors on a low-end Ryzen 3 processor, here are some benchmarks.

AMD is upstreaming more of their changes to the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver with Linux 4.14.

Leo Liu of AMD is out today with another series if video/multimedia related patches for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack.

AMD's embargo has just expired on the Threadripper performance figures. The Windows numbers at least are very positive.

For those running Ubuntu or one of its derivatives that have been wanting to play with AMDGPU's DC "display code" functionality but can't be bothered to build the branched code, here's a fresh kernel build.

It's looking almost certain that AMDGPU's display code (a.k.a. "DC" and "DAL") will not be merged for the next Linux 4.14 cycle, but work on this massive display code-base is progressing and 120 more patches were published today.

This morning I was on a call with AMD and they are now able to confirm they have reproduced the Ryzen "segmentation fault issue" and are working with affected customers.

With running a number of new Ryzen Linux tests lately, a number of readers requested I take a fresh look at the reported Ryzen segmentation fault issues / bugs affecting a number of many Linux users. I did and still am able to reproduce the problem.

AMD's GPUOpen initiative has announced the open-source availability of their ProRender renderer.

AMD has completed their Ryzen desktop rollout today with the availability of Ryzen 3 CPUs on the low-end.

AMD has published another set of DC/DAL display patches today, this time amounting to 81 patches touching around four thousand lines of code.

While AMD's new Epyc processors have a new "Secure Encrypted Virtualization" feature, the support isn't yet mainlined in the Linux kernel but is getting closer.

A frustrated Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report that's been open nearly two years regarding AMD Grenada (basically, Hawaii cards in the R9 300 series) support on the open-source Linux driver being in a tough position for a subset of users.

Adding to the list of changes/features you will not find in Linux 4.13 is AMD's Secure Memory Encryption as supported by the new EPYC processors.