Intel News Archives

Intel developers have submitted their GCC compiler enablement patch for the Cascade Lake 14nm CPUs due out starting in early 2019.

Intel has published their initial whitepaper on BF16/BFloat16, a new floating point format to be supported by future Intel processors.

This morning Intel officially announced the Core i9 9980XE as the refreshed Skylake-X part succeeding the Core i9 7980XE.

While we haven't had much to talk about the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver in development as the future Mesa OpenGL driver for the company's graphics hardware, it has continued progressing nicely since its formal unveiling back in September.

There has been a flurry of activity recently for the GCC 9 compiler due to feature development ending soon. The latest work hitting their mainline tree this morning is support for the Intel PTWRITE instruction.

A new patch-set proposed by one of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers would allow power-savings under load of roughly up to 3%.

Intel has reaffirmed shipping their next-gen Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors in the first half of 2019 while revealing today some initial performance details.

The merge window isn't even over yet for the current Linux kernel cycle that will end in late December or early January, but Intel's stellar open-source crew responsible for their kernel graphics driver have already sent out their first set of changes to DRM-Next for what will start 2019 with either the Linux 4.21 cycle or 5.1 depending upon how the 4.20~5.0 versioning is decided.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center (OTC) is now the latest organization making use of the Contributor Covenant for aiming to do more to promote a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Modern Intel SoCs support S0ix low-power states during idle periods, which are sub-states of ACPI S0 that increase power-savings while supporting an instant-on experience for providing lower latency than ACPI S3.

While ODROID is most known for their various ARM single board computers (SBCs), some of which offer impressive specs, they have dabbled in x86 SBCs and on Friday announced the Intel-powered ODROID-H2.

Going in hand with their work on display stream compression for dealing with next-generation displays, the Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver developers are working on "FEC" support to deal with any errors that come up in the stream.

Existing Intel graphics hardware already supports SIMD32 fragment shaders and the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver has supported this mode for months, but it hasn't been enabled. That though is in the process of changing.

As a possible performance win, Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer of the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver has been developing a NIR cache.

The recently posted patch for Intel Whiskey Lake support in Mesa has now been merged for Mesa 18.3.

Happening now in New York City is the Intel "Fall Desktop Launch Event" where they are announcing their latest wares, much of which has already been leaked to date.

Intel a while back open-sourced their sound firmware and SDK and also launched the "Sound Open Firmware" project in cooperation with the Linux Foundation. It's been an interesting journey and getting Intel pointed towards offering more open-source firmware.

Among the developer/enthusiast tool-set of the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver developers has been Intel GPU Top (the command intel_gpu_top) that is distributed with the Intel-GPU-Tools collection. This GPU information utility inspired by Linux's well known top command reports for Intel HD/UHD/Iris Graphics hardware the usage information, but does require root privileges to operate. Intel GPU Top is about to get a major overhaul.

While 4K displays are great for now, 5K displays are on the horizon and Intel is hard at work preparing their open-source Linux graphics driver for supporting 5K displays and beyond.

As perhaps a sign of where Intel is heading for their GPU computing strategy with their in-development discrete GPUs, they are developing a Vulkan compute back-end for the widely-used OpenCV library. This Vulkan back-end is for handling GPU-based compute for neural networks with this Open Computer Vision library as an alternative to the CUDA and OpenCL GPU compute support.

Intel developers this week sent out their final set of feature updates for the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle.

There have been rumors going on in recent days about Intel hitting supply challenges with their current-generation 14nm products. Intel CFO and Interim CEO, Bob Swan, wrote a public letter today outlining those challenges.

Driven to improve the Chrome OS user-experience, Intel open-source developers have been working on improving their GPU reset behavior when encountering problems under 3D/multimedia workloads.

Last month we noted a new Gallium3D driver in-development by Intel dubbed "Iris" and potentially replacing their existing "classic i965" Mesa driver for recent generations of Intel HD/UHD/Iris graphics hardware. Intel developers have begun talking about this new open-source Linux GPU driver today at the XDC 2018 conference in A Coruña, Spain.

At XDC2018 in Spain this morning the talks were focused on testing of Mesa / continuous integration. During the talk by Mark Janes, the Intel open-source crew announced the public availability of all their CI data.

This year Intel HDCP support was merged into the mainline Linux kernel for those wanting to utilize this copy protection system in combination with a supported Linux user-space application, which for now appears to be limited to Chrome OS. HDCP 2.2 support is the latest revision now being worked on for the open-source Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver.

Intel open-source developers have already sent in multiple pull requests of feature work to DRM-Next that in turn will be pulled into the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window and they have one final batch of feature changes on the way.

One of the talks we are most interested in at XDC2018 is on the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver we discovered last month was in development.

OpenGL 4.6 has been out for more than a year but the Mesa-based drivers (namely RadeonSI and Intel) remain blocked from officially advertising this latest GL revision due to not yet supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension and related ARB_spirv_extensions.

At the European Open-Source Firmware Conference happening this week in Erlangen, Intel announced the open-source "Slimbootloader" (also referred to as Slim Bootloader) project that is quite exciting.

This week Intel developers sent in their first batch of drm-intel-next feature changes to DRM-Next of new material that will be merged for the next kernel cycle whether it ends up being called Linux 4.20 or likely Linux 5.0.

Last month we were the first to point out that Intel is developing a new Gallium3D graphics driver for their recent generations of HD/UHD Graphics and presumably moving forward with their discrete GPU solutions coming out in 2020. This new Intel Gallium3D driver called "Iris" continues making progress though isn't yet ready for end-users.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is launching a new initiative... a podcast. Through their new show Open-Source Voices they will be focusing upon their many open-source software projects and other efforts they are engaged in through the OTC. On their premiere episode happens to be Kelly Hammond (Software Engineering Director) and your's truly talking about the work Intel's been doing on Linux distribution development via Clear Linux.

Back in April was a discussion about dropping MPX support from the Linux kernel but no action taken. Now though an Intel developer is preparing to see this Memory Protection Extensions functionality removed from the mainline Linux kernel.

While there is already Cannonlake and Icelake support within Intel's Mesa drivers, the Amberlake support has just been merged.

This week Intel opened up a newly-completed Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM2) stack with support for Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Intel has announced their new U-series "Whiskey Lake" and Y-series "Amber Lake" processors for laptops, 2-in-1s/convertibles, and other low-power devices.

One of the features sadly not making it into the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel is the support for Intel's SGX -- the Software Guard Extensions.

There's some good news beyond Intel's CPU microcode re-licensing to clear up the confusion among users and developers this week: Intel is also re-licensing their FSP binaries to this same shorter and much more concise license.

Over the past day online there has been lots of controversy following some high-profile sites reporting about Intel's "un-friendly microcode license update" and its "ban on benchmarking", among other catch phrases. It's now been officially cleared up by Intel with a simpler license that doesn't forbid benchmarking, allows distribution vendors to re-distributed these binary files to their users, and doesn't have any other nastiness integrated into the legal text.

Intel stopped developing their Beignet open-source Linux OpenCL driver in February to concentrate all efforts now around their new Intel OpenCL NEO platform. But commits landed today with a few improvements for those still using Beignet.

The Linux "multi-function device" code updates were sent in overnight for the 4.19 kernel merge window with a few interesting additions.

After resisting Gallium3D for the past decade with a preference on continuing to maintain their "i965" Mesa classic driver and all they've invested into its compiler stack and more, it seems times are changing as the open-source Intel team has been starting up development of a modern Gallium3D driver.

Don't expect the Intel discrete gamer graphics card to come until 2020, but with the SIGGRAPH graphics conference happening this week in Vancouver, they have begun teasing their first PCI Express graphics card.

An Intel engineer has published the "Intel FPGA Video and Image Processing Suite" DRM driver today for Linux. This Direct Rendering Manager is intended for use with their Arria 10 FPGA system when combined with Intel DisplayPort IP.

Intel has landed initial support for Coreboot on their current-generation Coffeelake processors.

PECI is a new one-wire bus interface being developed at Intel for communication between Intel CPUs and chipset components to external monitoring/control devices. The Linux support for this Platform Environment Control Interface continues to be worked out by Intel's open-source Linux kernel developers.

The open-source upbringing of Intel's Tremont micro-architecture is continuing with some new Linux kernel patches outed today.

Last week Intel sent in a "final" batch of i915 DRM driver feature updates to DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle but it turns out there is one more batch of changes now focused on landing.

Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release.