Intel News Archives

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.

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years.

In addition to adding Intel Icelake support to the kernel's processor thermal / int340x code, there is an interesting change with the thermal management updates for Linux 5.4 to potentially boost the performance on Intel platforms.

For owners of recent Lenovo laptops that find frequent thermal throttling and ultimately lower performance compared to Windows, the company has formally acknowledged the issue and is working towards addressing the issue.

The engineers maintaining Intel's open-source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) encoders today released SVT-AV1 0.7 as the newest feature update to their speedy AV1 video encoder.

There were already 18 new PCI IDs for Intel's open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux graphics drivers for forthcoming Comet Lake processors with UHD Graphics, but now it appears there are even more models en route.

Moving towards their oneAPI beta release next quarter, the Intel developers are as busy as ever advancing their LLVM-based SYCL compiler and run-times for Windows and Linux.

Similar to their Deep Learning Reference Stack for delivering better AI / deep learning performance on Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel has now released the Database Reference Stack 1.0 for optimizing performance on their DC Persistent Memory.

Intel's new OpenGL Linux driver, their Gallium3D-based "Iris" implementation that is aiming to be the default before year's end, continues making striking progress.

The Linux 5.4 x86/cpu changes are as busy as always on the Intel side.

One of the steps Intel's open-source developers continue working on for Linux is supporting "execute only memory" that will already work with some of today's processors and serve as another defense for bettering the security of systems particularly in a virtualized environment.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.

While not quite as exciting as the big performance boost found with SVT-VP9 for AVX2 CPUs a few days ago, Intel's Scalable Video Technology team has released SVT-HEVC 1.4.1 as their newest feature release to this open-source H.265/HEVC video encoder.

Going on for months had been work by Intel Linux developers on supporting the FSGSBASE instruction for helping Intel CPU performance going back to Ivybridge where this instruction set extension was first introduced. The FSGSBASE support was queued for the Linux 5.3 kernel but was reverted due to "serious bugs" in the implementation. Intel has now published a revised version of this support.

Intel's open-source crew has released version 0.2 of its primarily Rust-developed Cloud Hypervisor and associated firmware also in Rust.

As a follow-up from this weekend's article about Intel's SVT-VP9 video encoder running much faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD, here are the results now before/after for ten different systems with this open-source CPU-based VP9 video encoder.

In our recent Mesa 19.2 benchmarks of Intel's old and new (Gallium3D) OpenGL Linux drivers one of the rare areas where the new "Iris" driver performed behind the classic driver was with "j2dbench" that stresses the Java OpenGL pipeline. At the time it was unknown why the new driver was performing subpar for this Java graphics test, but now at least there's one optimization so far in addressing that shortcoming.

Longtime Intel open-source graphics driver developer Chris Wilson today sent out a set of patches attempting to enable IOMMU coverage for graphics by default.

Intel's open-source team continues showing the power of optimizations... Or rather in this case, a three fold performance improvement due to previously limiting an AVX-512 routine that also works on AVX-2 CPUs. SVT-VP9 is now a lot faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD.

Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has now hooked into the DriConf infrastructure for handling driver tunables and workarounds.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver crew has been on an exciting spree lately of not only punctually enabling new hardware support but also pushing some big performance improvements for new and existing generations of graphics hardware. Today another performance achievement was unlocked.

Since June Intel's open-source developers have begun volleying the initial open-source graphics driver code for Tigerlake "Gen12" hardware. To date the Gen12 changes haven't been too invasive even with this being the first generation with the "Xe Graphics" engine branding. But that's now changed with a new patch series showing major changes to the graphics instruction set.

One interesting nugget of news from this week's Open-Source Firmware Conference is that some Intel firmware binaries pertaining to their Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) will be more liberally licensed under their simpler microcode/firmware license.

The Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support for the Linux kernel around the memory enclaves continues to be worked on by the open-source Intel team and is now up to their twenty-second revision but it's not clear that this code is ready yet for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle.

Intel announced at IFA 2019 in Berlin that their Core i9 9900KS processor will be releasing next month.

Following the recent hype of Intel's Windows graphics driver introducing integer mode scaling support, their open-source Linux graphics driver is receiving similar treatment with nearest-neighbor integer scaling support.

Intel has previously indicated they plan for their new "Iris" Gallium3D driver to become their default OpenGL driver for Linux by EOY 2019 as far as Broadwell graphics and newer are concerned. Working in that direction and acknowledging their "Gen 12" Tiger Lake graphics will only be supported under Gallium3D OpenGL, they have begun establishing the driver mappings to handle the change-over.

Since June there has been the Intel open-source development team volleying Linux patches for bringing up Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics. There have been several rounds of patches working on the new Gen 12 graphics and that experimental open-source support is coming with Linux 5.4. A new patch series sheds more light on one of the new Gen 12 hardware features: the Display State Buffer engine.

Intel open-source developer Kenneth Graunke who is the lead developer on their "Iris" Gallium3D driver has landed a new performance optimization in Mesa to help their Gen11/Icelake graphics performance.

Stemming from recent discussions over Intel's Linux enablement for Intel's Lightning Mountain SoC that characterized it as a "AIRMONT_NP" for a "network processor" even though it's not limited to networking use-cases, and with Intel's proliferation of different CPU cores in general, the Linux kernel is seeing some cleaning up of their different Intel CPU names.

Taking place back in May at the beautiful Skamania Lodge in Washington was Intel's OSTS 2019 for their annual Open-Source Technology Summit that traditionally was internal-only but has begun opening up including allowing external participants this year. I was at OSTS 2019 and it's by far my highlight of the year with many really great sessions and a lot of useful networking at the event. Intel's open-source team has now shared some video recordings from this open-source/Linux event.

After having been submitting various feature updates to DRM-Next the past few weeks of new graphics driver feature code to introduce in Linux 5.4, a final pull request was sent in today with the remaining feature work slated for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Linux kernel development activity has shown light on a new Intel SoC we haven't anything about to date... Lightning Mountain.

Two years after the OpenGL 4.6 specification was announced, Intel's open-source OpenGL Linux driver is now officially advertising the support after today landing the remaining SPIR-V enablement work.

Earlier this month Intel announced 11 Icelake CPUs for laptops and 2-in1s under their 10th Gen CPU line-up. Today the company announced the 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs also for 2-in-1s and laptops.

Intel Icelake laptops will soon be hitting store shelves and a vast majority of the Linux support has been squared away for many months. Unfortunately one bit still not mainlined is the Thunderbolt support.

Intel previously tried auto-enabling GuC and HuC functionality within their Linux kernel graphics driver but ended up reverting the support since the driver didn't gracefully handle the scenarios of missing/corrupt firmware files. The driver should now be more robust in such situations so they will try again for turning on the automatic behavior, possibly for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle.

Linux 5.4 is set to remove the Intel IOP33X and IOP13XX series of processors that are part of the company's former XScale product line for ARM-based CPUs.

While it remains to be seen if Tiger Lake will be able to ship on time in 2020 as the Icelake successor, the "Gen 12" Xe Graphics continue to be worked on with the company's open-source Linux graphics driver.

Intel has released a new version of their SYCL compiler and run-time code for single-source C++ programming and allowing offloaded computations to accelerators via OpenCL.

Last week was the Intel Gallium driver one line patch to boost performance by 1%. Today's code churn within Mesa for Intel's open-source Linux graphics drivers were larger but also with a more profound performance impact with some workloads now being faster by around 20%. Making this more exciting is that today's round of driver optimizations apply to the very common and mature "Gen 9" graphics hardware.