Intel News Archives


2,916 Intel open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

Intel Architectural LBR Support Going Into Linux 5.9

Intel CPUs have long supported LBR for last branch records as a means of recording the branches to which software has taken along with exposing other control flow information. This has relied upon model-specific registers while with future Intel CPUs this is being folded into a more universal CPU architectural feature. Support for Intel "Arch LBR" is set to come later this year with the Linux 5.9 kernel.

8 July 2020 - Architectural LBR - Add A Comment
GCC Compiler Support Posted For Intel AMX

Building upon Intel working on GNU toolchain support for AMX, the newly-detailed Advanced Matrix Extensions being introduced next year with "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon CPUs, the GCC compiler support has been sent out in patch form.

6 July 2020 - Advanced Matrix Extensions - Add A Comment
Intel AMX Support Begins Landing In LLVM

Following Intel publishing the initial Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) documentation at the end of June, the open-source/Linux bring-up has continued for these new CPU instruction set extensions set to premiere with Sapphire Rapids next year.

2 July 2020 - Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions - Add A Comment
Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-06 Released With New Features

While Intel has been providing daily snapshots of the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) open-source compiler, today marks the latest monthly feature compiler release to their cross-architecture language for direct programming that is based on C++ while leveraging SYCL, LLVM/Clang, and other open-source technologies for exploiting the potential of hardware from CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs.

25 June 2020 - oneAPI Data Parallel C++ - 1 Comment
Intel P-State Getting Energy Efficiency Knob, EPB Knob Change

Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux systems has been seeing a number of refinements lately including some major changes like shifting towards the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization governor by default. Further tuning with new/changed knobs is also on the way for giving users more control over their CPU power / performance preferences.

24 June 2020 - P-State Power Performance - Add A Comment
Intel Releases New Microcode For Skylake CPUs (20200616)

While Intel updated the CPU microcode for Skylake and other affected generations last week as part of the SRBDS / CrossTalk vulnerability that was made public last week Tuesday, today Intel quietly released another microcode revision but this time just for Skylake.

16 June 2020 - Intel microcode-20200616 - 11 Comments
RdRand Performance As Bad As ~3% Original Speed With CrossTalk/SRBDS Mitigation

Following today's disclosure by Intel of the CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability that is MDS-based and vulnerable across physical cores with affected instructions, Intel released new CPU microcode to mitigate the most prone/significant instructions. I've been benchmarking the impact of this new microcode on multiple systems and will have a full report tonight or tomorrow morning... But here is a look specifically at the look at the impact on the RdRand performance.

9 June 2020 - RdRand - 30 Comments
Linux 5.8 Supporting Intel TPAUSE Power-Optimized Delays, TSC Fix When Overclocking

TPAUSE is the new Intel instruction for supporting lightweight power/performance optimized and improved power/performance states for sleeping until the timestamp counter (TSC) has reached a desired value. This new instruction with Intel's Tremont architecture will now be used by Linux 5.8+ on supported CPUs for an optimized power state while waiting on a delay event.

3 June 2020 - TPAUSE Timer - Add A Comment
Intel Sends Out Patches Bringing Up The "DG1" Graphics Card Under Linux

For months now Intel's open-source driver developers have been working on the "Gen12" graphics support needed most notably for Tiger Lake and more recently is also confirmed for Rocket Lake. But Gen12 is also needed for the highly anticipated Xe Graphics with the discrete graphics offerings to come in the months ahead by Intel. Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver code, Intel today published the first DG1 patches for enabling their first discrete graphics card under Linux.

20 May 2020 - DG1 Discrete Xe Graphics - 13 Comments
Intel CET Support Still Getting Squared Away For Linux In 2020

Various open-source patches have gone back to at least 2017 for enabling Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for the Linux kernel and related components. This is the Intel feature for helping prevent ROP and COP/JOP style attacks via indirect branch tracking and a shadow stack. Recently there has been a fair amount of CET improvements to the various open-source components.

17 May 2020 - Control Flow Enforcement - 1 Comment
Intel Rocket Lake Platform Support Added To Mesa 20.2

Last week Intel open-source developers sent out their initial kernel driver patches for Rocket Lake graphics support and now the Rocket Lake platform support has been merged for Mesa 20.2 on the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side.

9 May 2020 - Rocket Lake - 5 Comments
Intel's High-Performance VP9 Encoder Sees Its Second Release

When it comes to Intel's high performance Scalable Video Technology (SVT) video encoders, SVT-AV1 is the most well known for its great speed and usage by Netflix and others. But Intel SVT also consists of VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encoders too and today brought the debut of SVT-VP9 0.2.

4 May 2020 - SVT-VP9 0.2 - Add A Comment

2916 Intel news articles published on Phoronix.