AMD News Archives

Alan Cox, the venerable Linux kernel developer presently employed by Intel and an avid open-source enthusiast, has lashed out against the recent release of Fedora 18. Cox calls the new Fedora release, "the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen." Alan ended up switching to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

After yesterday running some Intel Ivy Bridge graphics tests on Fedora 18 as a preview of future extensive benchmarks coming from the "Spherical Cow" release, here's some tests of the AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D on this week-old Fedora Linux release compared to its "Beefy Miracle" predecessor from 2012.

While AMD has went months without updating their Catalyst "Legacy" Linux graphics driver for the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards to support new X.Org Server / kernel releases and other bug-fixes, they decided today to finally put out an updated legacy driver! This updated AMD Catalyst Linux Legacy driver is tagged as version 13.1.

Catalyst 13.1 for Linux was released on Thursday as the first AMD Linux binary blob of 2013. This driver is notable since it officially supports X.Org Server 1.13.

Recently there was finally MSAA support added to the R300 Gallium3D driver. While multi-sample anti-aliasing finally made it to this open-source GPU driver that supports the old ATI R300 through R500 GPUs, benchmarks I did last week showed the R300 MSAA performance was a mess. Fortunately, Marek Olšák has made some significant performance optimizations to the R300g MSAA support.

In addition to killing the Xorg R300g state tracker target, on Sunday Marek Olšák pushed a number of other changes into the vintage "R300g" open-source graphics driver.

The open-source AMD "R600g" Gallium3D driver is slowly but surely closing in on OpenGL 3.3 support for this open-source Linux graphics driver that supports from the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 GPUs.

Last year UBO and TBO for the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver was talked about and early patches proposed, but merged on Friday was finally this support for Uniform Buffer Objects and Texture Buffer Objects. With the OpenGL UBO/TBO support, the Radeon R600g driver is now advertising GLSL 1.40 as needed for OpenGL 3.1 compliance.

Marek Olšák has implemented support for buffer copying using the CP DMA engine on Radeon HD 4000 "R700" GPUs and newer.

Catalyst A.I. is a feature built into AMD's proprietary Radeon graphics driver meant to enhance the OpenGL performance for certain games, but under Linux it's not incredibly useful.

To be published on Thursday and Friday of this week is the annual "year in review" articles for the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. While those articles are looking at the OpenGL performance for all driver releases made in the past year, some OpenCL benchmarks were also conducted.

It was just days ago that the R300 Gallium3D driver got HyperZ support fixed-up and was finally enabled by default for bettering the OpenGL gaming performance with the open-source Linux graphics driver. Now it looks like the newer R600g driver is getting into shape for properly handling ATI/AMD HyperZ.

AMD released the Catalyst 12.12 Linux graphics driver for those still reliant upon their binary blob for Radeon/FirePro graphics card support.

After the benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D sub-allocator that in some tests yields more than a 25% performance boost, initial testing was done of the new AMD a-sync DMA engine support for the open-source Radeon driver.

AMD has released updates to their multi-platform APP SDK for Accelerated Parallel Processing as well as to CodeXL, their closed-source tool for analyzing OpenCL code.

AMD has released yet another beta Linux beta driver for the Catalyst 12.11 series.

Marek Olšák has fixed up the HyperZ support within the R300 Gallium3D driver so that it's working properly for more applications. R300 HyperZ is finally in a state where he may be looking to enable the feature by default.

While no future generation Geode processors are coming out of AMD, the open-source community still continues to maintain the Geode X.Org graphics driver. Released on Sunday was the xf86-video-geode 2.11.14 driver.

Red Hat has announced that they've initiated a new project to bootstrap Fedora on the ARMv8 64-bit low-power architecture.

Weeks after NVIDIA released a new Linux driver to massively improve its OpenGL performance in large part to make the Source Engine and Valve's games run better on Linux, AMD is out with a similar Catalyst update. The latest Catalyst Linux beta is said to bring "significant performance improvements" for Left 4 Dead 2.

Many Linux users have been mad over AMD closing down its Operating System Research Center resulting in many AMD Linux open-source developers losing their jobs. Last week I wrote that ultimately it shouldn't be too worrisome for Linux users wanting to use AMD processors and chipsets on Linux and this still looks to be the case.

While many Linux users are rightfully quite mad over AMD laying off many Linux kernel developers and shutting down their Operating System Research Center, not all hope is lost for future AMD CPU products being well supported under Linux.

AMD has indeed shutdown its Dresden-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) in the latest round of cost-cutting efforts.

At the beginning of the week I reported that AMD got rid of at least three of their Linux kernel developers. It's becoming more clear though that it's not only three long-time Linux kernel developers they have let go.

At least three Linux kernel developers are no longer employed by AMD.

Here's another series of AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" Linux benchmarks to complement the many Vishera Linux benchmarks published on Phoronix since the debut of the FX-8350 processor on Tuesday.

One of the latest possible Linux power-related regressions I've heard about is that AMD Cool 'n' Quiet may no longer be functioning too well on Linux-based systems.

AMD Catalyst 12.10 for Linux was only officially released two days ago, but already there's a Catalyst 12.11 beta for Tux.

For those wanting more benchmarks of the AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core "Vishera" processor, here's some additional Ubuntu 12.10 results.

AMD's Catalyst 12.10 Linux graphics driver was released today.

Second-generation Bulldozer processors only started appearing recently in the form of the Trinity APUs with Piledriver cores. The next Bulldozer-2 wave will come when AMD releases their Piledriver-bearing "Vishera" FX-Series desktop processors. While this hardware has yet to publicly arrive, AMD is are already working on compiler support for their third-generation Bulldozer -- a.k.a. "Steamroller" -- micro-architecture.

As the latest AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU benchmarks under Linux, here's a quick look at the impact that Turbo Core Technology has under Linux.

AMD released a new development tool suite this week called CodeXL that focuses upon heterogeneous compute support across GPUs, CPUs, and APUs.

For those living with vintage ATI graphics hardware from the Rage 128 days, the EXA-enabled driver has been formally released.

AMD has released a beta proprietary Linux driver for Catalyst 12.9.

This morning you may be seeing a number of performance previews on AMD's Trinity APUs for the desktop, while the full embargo covering these latest Fusion products has yet to expire. Phoronix tests of Trinity under Linux are forthcoming.

For those not in Germany this week for XDC2012 and/or Oktoberfest, here are some new benchmarks to look at of the AMD FX-8150 "Bulldozer" processor on the Linux kernels from Linux 3.0 through the current Linux 3.6 kernel that's currently under development.

After five years of the open-source AMD strategy, John Bridgman is no longer managing these efforts.

Just one day after hearing Intel isn't planning "Clover Trail" Atom support under Linux due to targeting this low-powered processor towards Windows 8 tablets, similar information has now come out of AMD. The next-generation "Hondo" Fusion APUs are initially being targeted towards Windows 8 tablets rather than Linux/Android.

The AMD Catalyst 12.9 graphics driver for Linux was released on Thursday.

In the discussion about the latest AMD R600g driver improvements by Marek Olšák, the prolific independent contributor shares some of his personal views on the open-source graphics driver itself.

Marek Olšák has continued with his passionate development contributions to the R600 Gallium3D driver, being one of the few independent contributors continuing to make heavy contributions to this open-source AMD Linux graphics driver.

The R600g patches for reworking the atom state emission ordering have landed, after having to infer the ordering sequence from the Catalyst binary blob command stream.

While the Catalyst Linux graphics driver was overhauled five years ago, not everyone is satisfied with the closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver. Here's some interesting comments by a prominent Linux developer and his less than stellar Catalyst experience.

It was five years ago today that AMD's open-source strategy for Linux graphics driver support was publicly unveiled.

Today marks five years since the revolutionary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver was announced to the world by Phoronix. While the driver still had a lot of work ahead, it was September 2007 that brought the brand new Catalyst Linux driver that shared more code with the Catalyst Windows driver and ushered in a new era for AMD with providing same-day Linux driver support, performance improvements, and new functionality to match the Windows driver.

For those that enjoyed seeing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver TODO list but aren't able to contribute due to not owning any Radeon HD 7000 series hardware, there also exists an R600 Gallium3D driver TODO list that is in need of some attention.

Marek Olšák has continued with his "R600g" driver hacking. The latest patch-set coming from this prolific independent contributor to Mesa allows for anti-aliasing and transform feedback for Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" GPUs.

KWin, KDE's compositing window manager, will better play with the AMD Catalyst binary blob in the KDE 4.10 release by enabling direct rendering and the OpenGL 2.x back-end for those using the latest Catalyst driver.

Last week we heard news that NVIDIA is at least evaluating support for their binary graphics driver with Wayland, but on the AMD Catalyst binary driver side it doesn't look like they will be supporting the next-generation Linux display architecture "anytime soon", according to a reliable source.