AMD News Archives

Following some weekend benchmarks here are more complementary numbers on the Retbleed mitigation performance benchmark costs. These additional numbers are on a Zen 2 based AMD Ryzen 7 4800U APU that has been common both to laptops as well as embedded/low-profile devices for thin client computing, IoT / edge use-cases, and more.

Back in Linux 5.17 the AMD P-State "amd_pstate" driver was introduced for Ryzen and EPYC systems as an alternative to the ACPU CPUFreq frequency scaling driver with an emphasis on delivering better power efficiency for modern AMD Zen 2 and newer systems. Since the mainlining there hasn't been too much change to this driver but now a new patch series has been sent out with some updates.

It's great seeing AMD continuing to hire for more Linux/open-source driver developers. Beyond their many roles they are still working to fill on the CPU side of the house, they have a new job posting in hiring for their open-source GPU driver stack with a focus on multimedia efforts.

Today's Coreboot code now has AMD Rembrandt SoC support by splitting it out from the Sabrina SoC support that has been in the works the past several months for this open-source firmware project.

Somewhat surprisingly, AMD engineers have been working on some new Linux kernel patches for their aging Jadeite platform.

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it.

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Nürnberg to launch the Ryzen Embedded R2000 series for industrial use-cases along with IoT, thin clients, and edge computing.

After announcing the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series back in March and with Lenovo being their launch partner for these Zen 3 Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, AMD today shared an update on availability.

Earlier this year Pensando engineers began posting Linux patches for enabling their Elba DPU SoC. This data processing unit is powered by 16 x Arm Cortex-A72 cores and designed for supporting up to dual 200GE networking with this SoC intended for high-end networking equipment. It didn't take long for the AMD integration less than one month after AMD completed its Pensando acquisition with the new Linux patches now reflected as the AMD Pensando Elba.

One of my personal gripes with AMD's Zen CPU support on Linux has been the lack of timely support for CPU temperature monitoring with their "k10temp" driver. Even though usually just new IDs are often needed and sometimes needing to adjust offsets or other minor changes, it has traditionally been done post-launch and sometimes left up to patches from the open-source community. Thankfully that has been changing and with Zen 4 it looks like that support will be ready for launch-day with the mainline Linux kernel.

While not record-shattering like the 1.1 Exaflops Frontier supercomputer at ORNL that took the Top500 spot this year from Fugaku, LUMI was inaugurated today with the claim of Europe's most powerful supercomputer.

A patch from AMD to further tune the Linux kernel's scheduler around NUMA imbalancing has been queued up and slated for introduction in Linux 5.20. For some workloads this scheduler tuning can help out significantly for AMD Zen-based systems and even on Intel Xeon servers has the possibility of helping too.

AMD today hosted their 2022 Financial Analyst Day where they made some new disclosures and firmed up past product road-map plans.

Earlier this year was an AMD Linux patch to prefer using MWAIT rather than HALT for cases where the CPU idle driver isn't being used. Using MWAIT can lead to significant improvements for the exit latency and now for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this year that change is expected to land.

A new patch series posted today by AMD is enabling peer-to-peer support within their AMDKFD kernel compute driver for allowing communication between multiple AMD GPUs over the PCIe bus without needing intermediate copies through system memory. In turn this should help with the multi-GPU compute performance for the Radeon ROCm stack.

It appears that with upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors there will finally be Virtual NMI (VNMI) support for virtualization, a feature Intel CPUs have supported for well more than the past decade.

It was just last month that AMD announced plans to acquire Pensando and today that $1.9 billion deal has been completed.

Last year with the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors one of the new security features was SEV-SNP, or the "Secure Nested Paging" update to the Secure Encrypted Virtualization functionality that has built up with succeeding EPYC generations. While AMD published out-of-tree kernel patches in a GitHub repository to enable SEV-SNP and has been volleying several revisions to them on the kernel mailing list, one year later it's finally arriving in mainline with the Linux 5.19 kernel.

AMD CEO Lisa Su keynoted this morning for Computex 2022 where she talked up some of the company's processor plans for the rest of the year. The focal points were on the much anticipated Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors as well as announcing the "Mendocino" APUs that will be coming to affordable laptops later in the year.

AMD on Tuesday released the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit featuring a Xilinx Kria K26 System-on-Module and tailoring it for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communication/control use-cases while running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

For over the past year we've seen various patches posted by AMD engineers with a state effort around preparations for the Frontier supercomputer. Most of these patches have involved memory handling under Linux and the special purpose memory handling between the CPU/GPUs. Published on Monday was their latest work on coherent device memory mappings for the Linux kernel.

The AMD-owned Xilinx posted a new patch series today implementing a new DRM display driver for supporting their soft MIPI DSI Tx subsystem IP.

Last month an AMD engineer began posting Linux kernel patches so the kernel prefers the MWAIT instruction over HALT for lowering the CPU idle exit latency. Preferring MWAIT over HALT has been something Intel CPUs on Linux have preferred going back to the Core 2 days and indeed with modern AMD CPUs there is significant advantages to lowering the exit latency in doing so for the idle code. This morning the latest iteration of the work was posted.

Upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors are bringing improvements to their Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) capabilities that can be utilized by Linux's wonderful perf utility and subsystem.

Going along with many recent s2idle (suspend to idle) fixes as well as other fixes/workarounds/improvements like around S0ix, a patch is pending as a fix/workaround to get s2idle behaving correctly -- or rather, more timely -- on more AMD Ryzen powered Lenovo laptops.

Following AMD completing its Xilinx acquisition back in February, AMD is now preparing to ramp up their investment into embedded Linux. AMD is hiring for the "creation and maintenance" of a Yocto-based Embedded Linux platform for running on Xilinx SoCs.

Merged in Linux 5.18 is the AMD HSMP driver for enabling the "Host System Management Port" usage under Linux as an interface for enabling additional system management functionality on AMD EPYC 7003 servers. For Linux 5.19 this AMD HSMP driver is set to be extended with additional features coming with next-generation AMD EPYC servers.

AMD continues working on their open-source Linux driver support for next-gen GPUs... The latest patches posted on Friday are for "GFX11", pointing to the major new graphics IP version with RDNA3 graphics processors due out later this year.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory now has their Kripke software ported to running on AMD's HIP for GPU acceleration.

AMD's open-source Linux engineers on the CPU side of the house continue being quite busy with all sorts of new feature enablement work, which given their timing and other factors is almost all definitively for upcoming Zen 4. AMD this week sent out updated patches in getting "PerfMonV2" support in order that is updated performance monitoring abilities with upcoming processors.

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older.

This year AMD engineers working on hardware enablement for Linux have been busy with EDAC driver improvements like RDDR5 and LRDDR5 handling, AMD Scalable Machine Check Architecture (SMCA) additions for "future" CPUs, and the various other areas outside of the error detection and correction field. Today though is a new patch series back in that hardware error handling space with new SMCA code.

The newest software addition under AMD's GPUOpen software umbrella is HIP-RT as a ray-tracing library for HIP.

On Friday AMD published new CPU microcode files for both Family 17h and Family 19h for Zen 1/2/3 processors. At the moment there isn't any public insight into the changes with this updated microcode but it may be significant.

Introduced last year with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the latest iteration of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. SEV-SNP adds additional integrity protections and safeguards as part of this "Secure Nested Paging" extension of SEV. Finally with Linux 5.19 the SEV-SNP support should premiere in the mainline kernel.

As a Linux kernel change for benefiting AMD CPUs going back to Zen 1 and for matching behavior Intel has had in place since the Core 2 times, AMD submitted a patch for having the Linux kernel use the MWAIT instruction instead of HALT for when the system isn't using the CPU idle driver either for C-states being disabled by the BIOS or the driver not part of the kernel build. In turn this can lead to around a 21% improvement in exit latency on affected systems.

Back in February AMD engineers sent out a "request for comments" on x2APIC virtualization (x2AVIC) support. Those patches have now been refined beyond the RFC state and sent out today as a patch series for further review on the Linux kernel mailing list.

While there are many new features with Linux 5.18 with its merge window having just ended days ago, feature code is already beginning to accumulate within the various "-next" branches for what will be Linux 5.19 this summer. Patches merged today get AMD Branch Sampling (BRS) functionality in place for Zen 3 processors with that next kernel cycle.

It was just two months ago AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx and now its newest data center play is entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando.

AMD's GPUOpen team today announced "Orochi" as their latest open-source software offering in the HIP GPU compute space.

Right now under Linux it isn't quick and easy to figure out if the likes of (Transparent) Secure Memory Encryption are enabled and working but a new patch series will more easily expose the security attributes of the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) to users on Linux. Among the information to be exposed will also include whether the CPU is fused in the name of tampering prevention.

I was informed that AMD has a few more Linux positions open at the company. While they have in past years been rather nimble with their Linux staffing, things continue to change thanks to their ongoing successes in the marketplace from the consumer side with Steam Deck through the likes of Tesla's infotainment system up through high-end server platforms.

Following our how-to guide for enabling the new AMD P-State driver that premiered in Linux 5.17 after finding many users were unsure to go about using this new CPU frequency scaling driver, AMD is now making it easier to switch from ACPI CPUFreq to AMD P-State.

AMD continues improving their Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver code within the Linux kernel ahead of next-generation processors debuting later this year.

Since the release of the Linux 5.17 kernel the leading question in my inbox has been from readers asking how to actually make use of the AMD P-State driver. Right now this driver isn't the default over ACPI CPUFreq and I haven't seen any Linux distribution vendors announce their plans to immediately default to this new driver, but over the months ahead I expect that to change. In any case, if wanting to use amd_pstate on Linux 5.17 today here is a brief how-to guide for making the transition.

AMD quietly posted a new version of its instruction set architecture documentation concerning its Instinct MI200 accelerator. AMD originally published the ISA documentation for the MI200 back in November but it seems to have gone unnoticed (including by me) while in February they went ahead and released a new version of that technical documentation.

AMD is now among the latest companies backing the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for that increasingly popular free build derived from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources now that CentOS 8 is end-of-life.

The latest Linux kernel patch activity out of AMD in preparation for next-generation "Zen 4" processors is enabling AMD Performance Monitoring Version Two "PerfMonV2" support.

AMD today announced the ship date and suggested pricing for their much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor as well as new Ryzen 7/5/3 series processors.

One of the most prominent additions to the Linux 5.17 kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver akin to Intel's P-State driver and aims to deliver better energy efficiency than AMD Zen 2 and newer processors currently on the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With Linux 5.18 an AMD P-State tracer tool is to be included with the kernel source tree for helping to analyze and tune this new driver.