Intel News Archives

Last week ago we provided a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact from Intel's Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum that required a CPU microcode update to mitigate but that comes with a performance hit. At least Intel has pending GNU Assembler patches to help offset that performance hit. In time for last week's articles I didn't have a chance to perform Skylake Xeon Scalable (1st Gen) benchmarks but now here are some metrics alongside Cascade Lake.

The Intel "Gen11" Iris Plus Graphics on Ice Lake are a big upgrade over earlier Intel graphics generations but the gains are even more enticing if making use of their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver.

While the patches overnight about "substantial" improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it's less so now as it turns out last week's graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings.

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson has sent out a set of 19 patches for what he calls fast soft-RC6 support and is a "substantial" improvement over the current driver code for Intel graphics power-savings.

With yesterday's much anticipated Intel oneAPI beta being built around open-source standards like SYCL, the "cross-device" support can at least in theory extend beyond just Intel platforms. Codeplay is already showing that's possible with a to-be-open-source layer that will allow oneAPI and SYCL / Data Parallel C++ to run atop NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA.

A patch series was merged today for the in-development Mesa 20.0 to further lower the CPU overhead of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver.

Making waves today is that Intel will be removing very old BIOS and driver downloads from their site on or after 22 November. Though these software downloads for the products in question are around ~20 years old so the real-world impact should be small plus with Linux drivers being in the mainline kernel, all you'd really be losing out on are BIOS updates that themselves haven't seen updates in years.

SUSE developer Giovanni Gherdovich has sent out the latest patches on supporting frequency invariance within the kernel's scheduler code and ultimately making use of it for select Intel CPUs to yield not only better raw performance but also power efficiency.

In addition to announcing the much anticipated oneAPI beta, Raja Koduri spent his time at Intel's event today also talking about "Ponte Vecchio" as their forthcoming general purpose GPU.

The upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle should bring an improvement for power management on Intel's latest-generation Ice Lake processors.

The Intel developers working on their open-source compute run-time this morning released a new version as they continue making improvements to their Gen11 Ice Lake support as well as further bringing up the Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support.

Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems.

Of the 77 security advisories Intel is making public and the three big ones of the performance-sensitive JCC Erratum, the new ZombieLoad TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort), and iTLB Multihit No eXcuses, there are also two fixes to their kernel graphics driver around security issues separate from the CPU woes.

The Linux kernel has just received its mitigation work for the newly-announced TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) variant of ZombieLoad plus revealing mitigations for another Intel CPU issue... So today in addition to the JCC Erratum and ZombieLoad TAA the latest is iITLB Multihit (NX) - No eXcuses.

In addition to the JCC erratum being made public today and that performance-shifting Intel microcode update affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake, researchers also announced a new ZombieLoad side-channel attack variant dubbed "TSX Asynchronous Abort" or TAA for short.

A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver.

Complementing the earlier Intel Ice Lake "Gen11" graphics comparison and the Windows vs. Linux Ice Lake graphics driver numbers, here are some additional Vulkan data points in different Linux and Steam Play games.

With the Linux 5.3 kernel release this summer Intel enabled Speed Select Technology under Linux for this feature found on new Cascade Lake processors. The SST Linux tool has now seen some updated patches ahead of the forthcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

With Mesa 19.3 having been branched yesterday, hitting Git master today as an early change for Mesa 20.0 is an overhaul to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver's buffer object (BO) allocation code.

The Intel Core i9 9900KS is still on track for shipping this month as the revived Coffeelake CPU that is capable of hitting an all-core turbo frequency of 5.0GHz. Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 9900KS are coming.

Just over one year ago were proposed changes to improve the insight into per-client load activity for Intel graphics under Linux. The changes would indicate how busy each Intel graphics engine (render, blitter, video, etc) was on a per-client basis and other metrics similar to what users have to look at when it comes to analyzing CPU activity. Those patches were never followed up on or merged but have been revived this past week.

The newest Vulkan extension now supported by Intel's open-source "ANV" Linux driver is VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model.

On top of the many Linux 5.4 features we have been talking about so far, it turns out with this kernel update due out in November that 8K display support for Intel (Gen11 Icelake and newer) should be in order.

The team maintaining the LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler as part of their "NEO" OpenCL/Compute Stack have rolled out v1.0.2714 that includes initial support for Jasper Lake among other improvements.

Intel's open-source developers kicked off a new week by sending in their latest vetted changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

Intel developers have been working on the Cloud Hypervisor that is written in Rust and built atop KVM as an open-source VMM designed for running modern cloud workloads while being focused on just supporting modern software/interfaces and relying upon para-virtualized (VirtIO) devices without legacy support. This week marked a new release of this forward-looking KVM-based hypervisor solution.

While we had been eager for Intel's goal of defaulting to their new Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver by EOY2019, it looks like that is going to swing by one quarter with the plan now for Mesa 20.0 at the end of Q1.

Details are still light on Jasper Lake, but volleyed onto the public mailing list today was the initial support for the Jasper Lake PCH within the open-source Linux graphics driver side.

With devices beginning to hit store shelves using the new Intel WiFi 6 AX200 series chipsets, the firmware binaries have landed in linux-firmware.git for rounding out support for these latest WiFi/Bluetooth adapters.

A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base.

As written about a few days ago, Intel engineers added Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support to their compute stack "NEO" for Linux users. That support has now made it into their latest weekly release of the Intel Compute Runtime.

While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release.

Intel engineers have contributed GPU-accelerated memory copy support to FFmpeg when making use of their preferred video decode implementation.

After an incredible 25 year journey at Intel and having founded the Open-Source Technology Center, Imad Sousou announced today he is stepping away from Intel.

While just one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window cut-off and now with XDC 2019 out of the day, Intel's open-source graphics driver team sent in their first batch of new material they will be targeting for the Linux 5.5 cycle.

In addition to The Cascadelake X-Series CPUs launching at a much lower price, Intel announced the Xeon W-2200 series today also at lower pricing while cutting prices on their existing Core 9000 F-series desktop CPUs too.

In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model.

This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference.

We were alerted this morning to a CPU bug resulting in crashes for Intel Geminilake processors. At least Chrome and Firefox are affected but sounds like other software may be affected too, just that Google has enough engineering resources for investigating the issue.

Intel's open-source crew on Friday released version 19.39.14278 of their compute/OpenCL runtime.

One of the interesting reveals so far from this week's X.Org Developers' Conference in Montreal is that Intel has been developing a new back-end compiler for their OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers based upon their experiences so far with their NIR support and the lessons learned over the past number of years.

Intel's open-source crew has had a busy week with their first public OpenVKL release, OSPray 2 hitting alpha, and now the release of MKL-DNN where they are also re-branding it as the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL).

Details have emerged on Intel's forthcoming Core i9 10900 X-Series processors.

While announced some months ago, today in-step with the OSPray 2.0 Alpha ray-tracing release is the inaugural development release of the Open Volume Kernel Library (OpenVKL).

Intel open-source engineers have sent out their initial patches wiring up USB 4.0 support for the Linux kernel.

Sadly not making it for the just-closed Linux 5.4 merge window but hopefully something we could see in Linux 5.5 is recent patches on "frequency invariance" in optimizing the Schedutil frequency scaling governor that will really benefit Intel CPUs and improve their performance by double digits.

Ahead of the oneAPI beta expected this quarter, Intel's OSPray ray-tracing engine that is set to be part of the oneAPI rendering tool-kit is embarking on its next major release.

Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot.