AMD News Archives

Open-source developers working on the Radeon Linux graphics driver stack remain hopeful that their massive "DAL" code-base will be ready for merging with Linux 4.7.

Well, today seems to be the day for x86 CPU vendors to push out memory security related features for the Linux kernel... After Intel posted the Secure Guard Extensions driver for Linux, AMD has come out with a patch-set for "Secure Memory Encryption" (SME) that looks like it will be a hardware feature of Zen.

For those running a Linux system powered by an AMD "Carrizo" APU, there's an updated firmware blob out today to benefit your UVD video decoding experience.

AMD this afternoon announced CodeXL 2.0 as the newest version of their GPU debugger, CPU/GPU profiler, and static kernel analyzer. CodeXL 2.0 is a big leap forward and is now open-source!

Well this is surprising and unfortunate: it appears that AMD's next-generation Polaris GPUs don't support the royalty-free ETC2 texture compression.

Along with open-sourcing the next-gen Polaris GPU driver code yesterday, Alex Deucher of AMD laid out their plans for aiming to get the DAL display code into the Linux 4.7 kernel.

One week after the surprise of delivering a beta of their new hybrid "PRO" driver stack, here's another big surprise: AMD has just published the initial open-source code for driver support with their upcoming "Polaris" graphics processors!

AMD this morning unveiled their XConnect technology to connect an external, high-performance Radeon graphics card to a notebook or 2-in-1 device.

Since last year we have been waiting for AMD to launch their "HuskyBoard" ARM development board built around their Opteron A1100 ARM 64-bit SoC. That board was originally supposed to ship in Q4'15 while now available for pre-order is a new A1100 development board that looks like it may be taking its place.

A technical marketing representative of AMD / Radeon Technologies Group is participating in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" today where he's been answering a few Linux questions.

AMD's Marek Olšák sent out a set of 26 patches this morning for preparing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to have interoperability support between OpenGL and HSA/OpenCL.

The latest fruits of AMD's GPUOpen initiative is the open-sourcing of a beta of AMDOVX.

While NVIDIA has long supported G-SYNC on Linux as their adaptive sync technology for eliminating screen tearing, AMD hasn't supported their FreeSync tech via their open or closed-source Linux drivers. Fortunately, it's looking like that will change.

We weren't the only ones surprised by the massive size of the new AMDGPU DAL display driver. Weighing in at 93k lines of code, upstream Linux graphics developers outside of AMD are also stunned by the size of this code-base for handling display-related functionality with the AMDGPU driver for Tonga / Carrizo / Fiji.

Not only does RadeonSI Gallium3D work with XCOM 2 on Linux for AMD graphics processors, but it looks like the Catalyst (or now known as Radeon Software, officially) too works with this brand new, highly anticipated strategy game seeing a same-day release across OS X / Linux / Windows.

The AMDGPU DRM driver support for Iceland (Topaz) graphics processors is now considered stable with the experimental flag set to be removed.

Landing last month in the LLVM SVN/Git code-base was the SI machine scheduler for the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. This scheduler has the potential to improve the performance for some hardware/workloads, but not by the wide margins originally reported by some early testers.

AMD this morning updated its Kaveri APU line-up and also released a new Athlon X4 processor.

Super-computing researchers part of the Institute of System Research for the Russian Academy of Sciences recently presented on using the open-source Radeon driver for OpenCL.

Last week AMD launched GPUOpen and began shipping their new and open code. Today the company has published a guide for taking advantage of the Boltzmann stack with their Radeon Open eCosystem Kernel and Runtime.

Since yesterday's release of Linux 4.5-rc2 there was at least one report of AMDGPU performance improvements with Linux 4.5-rc2 for an R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics card.

When it comes to OpenGL 4 support on the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN graphics cards, currently the only R600g-supported cards advertising OpenGL 4.1 right now are the Radeon HD 5800 "Cypress" and Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series. Here are some tests done with OpenGL 4.1 on a Radeon HD 5830 compared to Cayman and various GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Today's the day that AMD opens up GPUOpen.

AMD's upcoming "Stoney" APUs has support for ETC2 texture compression.

Since last month Intel has offered compute shader support via their open-source Linux graphics driver. The ARB_compute_shader support is needed for OpenGL 4.3 but so far Intel is the only Mesa/Gallium3D driver having support for this important extension.

The AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) code has been mainlined within the GCC compiler!

The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD's media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems.

Earlier today I wrote about how AMD will only be supporting Vulkan with the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and not the more common Radeon DRM kernel driver. Here's a few more points to clarify the situation.

It looks like the merging of AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support into the GCC compiler is imminent.

AMD appears poised to announce their long-awaited A1100 "Seattle" ARMv8 processor tomorrow.

With the Linux 4.5 merge window's hwmon subsystem pull request is an update for new AMD Family 15h processors to support power monitoring.

With this morning's article about New AMDGPU Details and Looking Forward To Major Radeon Linux Improvements In 2016, there is much to be excited about with the new driver model finally set to roll-out and other open-source projects coming about. However, if you are a relatively new Linux users, you may not know how this whole process began.

New patches have been posted by an AMD engineer for exposing accumulated power reporting.

As of earlier this month in Mesa Git is finally OpenGL 4.0 and 4.1 support for the Radeon R600g driver for pre-GCN hardware, albeit the subset capable of advertising GL4 compliance is right now just Cypress and Cayman. I took this opportunity to run some fresh Mesa Git benchmarks on an AMD Cayman GPU and a third run when enabling DRI3.

AMD this morning is lifting an embargo on GPUOpen, a new effort for embracing open-source with their Linux drivers.

While I ended up returning my AMD A10-8700P "Carrizo" laptop due to its faulty fan, I did run a few benchmarks of it prior to sending it back. Here's roughly what you can expect in terms of its performance against Intel Core i3 and i5 laptops.

Smach Z, the portable/handheld Steam Machine powered by Linux, is moving ahead and hopes to launch to market this time next year.

AMD's R600 Gallium3D driver just made it up to OpenGL 4.1 support (for the few select GPUs that provide the necessary capabilities), but things aren't stopping there with another OpenGL 4.3 extension now landing.

Just one week after talking about progress being made with AMD tessellation support for pre-GCN GPUs, the support has been finally added to Mesa Git!

Alex Deucher on Friday sent out the latest patches for implementing ASoC support for AMD APUs. These patches provide i2s audio support via a new driver and integrates with the AMDGPU DRM.

For those excited to see some AMD A10-8700P "Carrizo" notebook benchmarks on Linux, here are a few numbers.

A Phoronix reader pointed out an interesting slide deck that's gone relatively unnoticed up until now about a game developer "Hacking GCN via OpenGL" for allowing some interesting possibilities.

As a follow up to What Sub-$500 Laptops Are You Most Interested In For Linux?, one of them has been chosen so far and will satisfy the many from the dozens of comments wanting to see an AMD Carrizo laptop tested under Linux.

As the latest on today's interesting AMD Crimson driver release for both Linux and Windows, the release notes for the new Linux driver build are now available.

Here's the latest in my hurried but exciting testing of the AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition for Linux atop Ubuntu.

Early this morning I wrote a brief article about AMD working on an LLVM-based Heterogeneous Compute Compiler and since then more details have come to light.

AMD has been open-sourcing several components of their Linux HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) stack for the past several months including the AMDKFD kernel driver and HSAKMT run-time. In cooperation with SUSE, they also hope to have HSA accelerator support in GCC 6. Besides the GCC support, AMD is apparently planning to publish a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler.

Thanks to Glenn Kennard, the R600 Gallium3D driver now supports another OpenGL 4.3 extension that was already available for RadeonSI, Intel i965, Nouveau NV50/NVC0, and even the Softpipe and LLVMpipe drivers.

A Phoronix reader pointed out that a developer has released an assembler for AMD GCN GPUs that supports both the open and closed-source Catalyst drivers on Linux.

Alex Deucher sent in another pull request of new AMDGPU/Radeon DRM material for landing in DRM-Next to in turn make it into Linux 4.4.