AMD News Archives

AMD quietly released an update to their preferred compiler, Open64, last week. The AMD Open64 4.5.2 compiler supports their next-generation "Piledriver" Fusion APUs.

We're now going into eight months since the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series "Southern Islands" graphics cards first launched. In that time the Catalyst Linux support has been stable and fine, but the open-source driver support is still unusable.

For those that didn't notice, this week AMD released a new header that defines the AMD ACPI interface used for laptops, PowerXpress, and chipset-specific functionality.

While the AMD Linux graphics team is busy proposing an LLVM back-end staging area, the AMD CPU folks have begun work on the GCC compiler and preparing support for the next-generation Bobcat processors.

Tom Stellard of AMD has proposed a staging area for LLVM back-ends, similar to the staging area of the Linux kernel.

Following yesterday's article about Radeon Gallium3D HyperZ support defeating open-source developers, Jerome Glisse has clarified the situation after trying to make this code work properly for more than a half-year.

Jerome Glisse has published a new patch to enable HyperZ support for the AMD Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver. While this patch could be pushed to Mesa, it's not being enabled by default as it's still causing some GPU lock-ups and developers can't seem to figure out the cause. Jerome is now moving onto other work.

There's now open-source GPU-based 2D hardware acceleration support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards using the xf86-video-ati driver.

It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver.

While owners of ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000/7000 series graphics cards have already had a Catalyst 12.6 Linux driver -- which many Linux users found to be disappointing -- today AMD has released a Catalyst 12.6 "Legacy" Linux driver for those using the older generations of Radeon hardware.

Following the changing of the Catalyst release schedule and dropping old hardware support, Catalyst 12.6 for Linux has been officially released. However, it's already disappointing some Linux binary driver users.

Last week there were XBMC developers that wrote a public message on Phoronix about AMD's problems with video playback acceleration using their Catalyst Linux driver. The developers called AMD out on their shortcomings and now today there's a response out of AMD.

For those intrigued by the article written by XBMC developers after being frustrated by AMD's Catalyst Linux driver, here's a look at some of the other options for GPU-based video acceleration under Linux.

In the discussion last night about AMD not having any plans to suspend their proprietary Linux driver, John Bridgman of AMD shared some interesting information about AMD planning to provide a full execution stack in open-source form.

Since AMD's decision to discontinue HD 2000/3000/4000 series support from the Catalyst driver plus other changes that upset some hardware owners, there's been some rumors that AMD may be discontinuing development of the Catalyst Linux driver and focus solely upon the open-source AMD Linux driver.

The R600 Gallium3D driver is beginning to enable Stream-Out support by default for a greater selection of the Radeon graphics processors.

AMD will be placing an ARM Cortex-A5 on future-generation Fusion APUs as what initially they are saying is for hardware-based security measures via ARM TrustZone Technology.

The R600g LLVM shader compiler back-end that's primarily intended for the Radeon Gallium3D compute support is now working a bit better for graphics support compared to when it was first committed.

Compute (OpenCL) support for the AMD Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" graphics cards has now landed in Mesa Git master.

While patches have been around for more than one year to support Hierarchical Z on the ATI/AMD R600 open-source driver, the Gallium3D support still hasn't been merged.

Fear not for all of those who have been very angry over AMD dropping the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 support in the same release as providing X.Org Server 1.12 support, word on the streets of Toronto is that their legacy driver branch does have support for this latest xorg-server release.

There were more OpenCL/compute-related commits to Mesa Git master on Friday afternoon. The main item is that the Radeon HD 5000 series has its compute support hooked-up.

Hidden away within the new Catalyst 12.6 Linux driver are 2D acceleration improvements. These improvements aren't visible by default but there's a special command to activate this "ShadowPrimary" support.

While AMD is changing their Catalyst driver program and there wasn't any Catalyst 12.5 release, there is a public beta of Catalyst 12.6 for Linux.

Word is breaking today on the Windows-focused web-sites that AMD's Catalyst driver program has fundamentally changed. How does this impact Linux Catalyst users? Unfortunately, it will likely prove to be in a bad way.

AMD admits it has had some Linux support problems with its graphics drivers and they'll be working to improve the situation.

For those disappointed by the results of the open-source vs. closed-source AMD Radeon graphics driver results on Linux at this time, you may be more pleased going forward and carry hope for open-source AMD advancements in 2013.

If you happen to be an unfortunate soul still using an old ATI Rage graphics processor, the "R128" driver now has EXA acceleration support after about a decade and a half of the hardware being around.

AMD has brought back the gDEBugger software to Linux.

Yesterday while the Phoronix server infrastructure was being hammered by the exclusive Valve Linux work, AMD released their Catalyst 12.4 Linux driver.

AMD's Tom Stellard has published the latest series of patches for bringing up the GPGPU compute infrastructure in their open-source R600 Gallium3D driver.

Just one day after the Radeon HD 5000 series on Gallium3D gained GLSL 1.30 compliance by default, the R600 (Radeon HD 2000/3000 series) and R700 (Radeon HD 4000 series) now have GL Shading Language 1.30 support advertised by default.

The AMD Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" graphics cards, which at the hardware level is capable of OpenGL 4.2 / GLSL 4.20, is finally advertising GLSL 1.30 compliance by default with the Mesa Gallium3D "R600g" driver. GLSL 1.30 is the GL Shading Language revision introduced at the time of OpenGL 3.0.

AMD has released the xf86-video-ati 6.14.4 X.Org driver, which brings a few new features to their DDX component.

AMD has officially released Catalyst 12.3 for Linux as its March 2012 update for those relying upon this binary graphics driver.

Tom Stellard of AMD has called upon the LLVM developers to include the R600 GPU back-end into the LLVM project, which is the code for generating compute and graphics shaders inside the LLVM compiler infrastructure for targeting Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics processors.

As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early "beta" builds of AMD's Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly.

AMD has finally released the open-source driver code to support the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" GPUs and next-generation Fusion "Trinity" APUs under Linux with their open-source driver.

AMD has released their belated Catalyst 12.2 Linux driver today. Unfortunately, it's not too exciting of a release.

Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 "Pitcairn" series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable.

While most Linux enthusiasts know by now that there still isn't open-source Radeon HD 7000 series support from AMD under Linux, the Catalyst situation isn't so clear. While they've been committed to launch-day Catalyst hardware enablement under Windows and Linux, for the penguin OS that doesn't seem to always be the case for the HD 7000 series.

Christian König of AMD has shared his plans for completing work on the VDPAU state tracker for Gallium3D. This Gallium3D state tracker allows for NVIDIA VDPAU video acceleration using GPU shaders on open-source hardware drivers such as Radeon and Nouveau.

For those AMD Catalyst users that were concerned by the recent statements of Martin Gräßlin that KWin will likely end up dropping their GL1 renderer, which would eliminate vintage GPU hardware support as well as Catalyst driver support, fear not.

AMD today launched the Radeon HD 7570/7770 graphics cards as the latest GPUs built on the GCN architecture. Unfortunately there still is not any open-source support for the Radeon HD 7000 series hardware nor has AMD sent out any review samples to Phoronix. But there is some other Catalyst Linux news to share.

AMD has unleashed the first Catalyst Linux binary driver update of 2012, but does Catalyst 12.1 bring anything interesting or just more breakage?

The XBMC multimedia project has implemented AMD's XvBA interface directly for providing video hardware acceleration for Radeon and Fusion graphics processors.

A new version of AMD's Catalyst Linux graphics driver is now available.

On Friday AMD released an LLVM back-end for its R600 Gallium3D Linux driver. The LLVM driver back-end was based upon the AMD IL LLVM back-end for OpenCL, which AMD has now separately announced to the LLVM developers as a new source-code drop.

Before calling it a week, Tom Stellard at AMD published a Git branch that offers up an LLVM shader back-end for the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver. This is one of the steps in bringing Compute/OpenCL support to the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

AMD's interested in driving the use of OpenCL within the open-source world, and they're willing to pay for it. One of their new contracts is to have more of the OpenCL work for GIMP/GEGL on the Open Computing Language.