Intel News Archives

In our Intel Kabylake benchmarks we have shown how Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver used by most Linux distributions can lead to much lower performance with their latest-generation processors compared to the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver. Fortunately, action is taking place for improving the P-State performance with Kabylake.

Yesterday I published Linux benchmarks of the Celeron G3930, Intel's lowest-end Celeron CPU at the moment in the Kabylake family. This CPU goes for about $40 USD and you get a dual-core 2.9GHz processor with HD Graphics 610 (GT1). I had published a few OpenGL benchmarks in that review while for this article are some OpenCL compute numbers.

Back in December was talk of dropping the (unofficial) Intel "ILO" Gallium3D driver while now it's looking like that may move forward.

Intel's forthcoming Geminilake hardware has a native HDMI 2.0 controller and as such the open-source Intel Linux driver developers are working on proper HDMI 2.0 support within their kernel driver.

Mesa's "ANV" Intel Vulkan driver can now be built for Android.

For those curious how Intel's flagship Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor is performing under Linux, my sample arrived yesterday and I've begun putting the CPU through its paces.

Daniel Vetter, the i915 DRM kernel maintainer from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, has announced their final set of feature changes to be queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

Note to self: don't drop CPUs on the ground. But even with a bent Core i5 "Kabylake" processor, it still managed to work.

There's some early feature development work that's landed in Mesa Git this Friday as the initial feature development towards Mesa 17.1.

Intel developers today announced the release of Beignet 1.3 and it's by far their most significant release yet for this open-source OpenCL implementation for Intel graphics hardware.

With the forthcoming Linux 4.10 kernel there is finally support for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 as featured in some newer Intel CPUs. But, unfortunately, the code in Linux 4.10 doesn't work for all TBM3-capable systems out there, but a new kernel patch is being worked on for Linux 4.11 or later to make it work with more hardware.

With the Linux 4.10 kernel having initial but limited Intel Graphics Virtualization Tech support, you can begin playing with the experimental virtual GPU support using the upstream kernel and libvirt.

For those running older Intel "Ivy Bridge" hardware on Linux, OpenGL 4.0 support soon should arrive.

As a quick update from this morning's article about Intel's Mesa driver getting ready for OpenGL 4.5 on Haswell, that code has now landed.

It was just two weeks ago that Intel's Mesa driver finally crossed the threshold with Haswell for supporting OpenGL 4.0 and then last week OpenGL 4.2 was crossed for this older generation of Intel graphics hardware. Now, it looks like OpenGL 4.5 will be enabled for Haswell with the i965 Mesa driver.

There's a patch pending for the Intel DRM driver that in extreme select cases can boost the graphics performance by up to 60% but for most OpenGL workloads the gains will be much smaller.

When firing up Intel's Beignet OpenCL implementation on Clear Linux this weekend, I was surprised to see it was happily chugging along with many of our different CL benchmarks.

Many free software advocates have been concerned by Intel's binary-only Management Engine (ME) built into the motherboards on newer generations of Intel motherboards. The good news is there is now a working, third-party approach for disabling the ME and reducing the risk of its binary blobs.

Skylake and newer hardware is set to have frame-buffer compression (FBC) enabled by default when the Linux 4.11 kernel rolls around in a few months. This feature can reduce power consumption while reducing memory bandwidth needed for screen refreshes.

Igalia developers have been doing a lot of work this past week from seeing their FP64 Haswell patches merged, issuing new Ivy Bridge FP64 patches for testing, Float64 support for the Intel Vulkan driver, and related work. The newest from Juan Suarez Romero on behalf of Igalian developers are the 11 patches needed for taking Intel's Mesa driver for Haswell to the OpenGL 4.2 milestone.

The work on supporting shaderFloat64 within Intel's "ANV" Mesa driver is now complete and merged into Mesa Git.

On Saturday I published Intel IvyBridge / Haswell /Broadwell / Skylake OpenGL and Vulkan Benchmarks On Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1 using various Core CPUs. But for some fun benchmarks this Sunday morning are GL/VLK results when using a Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPU with HD Graphics P530.

It's been a good week for users of older Intel Haswell graphics on Linux: beyond landing FP64 support and then exposing OpenGL 4.0 support, this older generation of Intel graphics now has a couple more OpenGL ES 3.2 extensions.

I'm in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I've also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware.

Fresh off their work on landing the long-awaited Haswell FP64 support followed by today enabling OpenGL 4.0 for Haswell (along with revised Float64 patches for Intel's Vulkan driver), there is now the FP64 patches for Ivy Bridge with the patches that ultimately enable OpenGL 4.0 on this generation-older hardware.

With Linux 4.10 going through its stabilization process, I've begun testing it on more and more systems. For your viewing pleasure today are some OpenGL and Vulkan results when testing Skylake HD Graphics 530 hardware with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git.

With FP64 for Haswell having landed in Mesa Git, the remaining patches have now been placed into Mesa Git as well for finally turning on OpenGL 4.0 for older Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4000 era hardware.

The latest development patches up for testing on Intel's DRM kernel driver is for supporting render decompression on the display engine of Skylake hardware and newer.

Today Intel officially unveiled their 7th Generation "Kaby Lake" desktop CPU line-up at CES.

Those making use of Intel Haswell graphics on Linux can rejoice this morning as the massive Igalia patch-set for wiring in ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support has finally landed in Mesa Git.

For those that don't recall, VDENC is a low-power, high-performance video encode engine added originally to Intel Skylake hardware. That aforelinked article covers the big benefits of using VDENC and the patches published earlier this year for enabling this Intel video encode engine on Linux.

With having out a Core i7 "Broadwell" ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop for the MoCA 2.0 network tests, I decided to run some end-of-year graphics tests on this Core i7 5600U system with OpenGL and Vulkan.

Intel's open-source Beignet OpenCL project for implementing CL/GPGPU support for Intel graphics hardware is on the edge of a big milestone.

With the Linux 4.10 merge window comfortably over now, Daniel Vetter has sent in the first pull requests to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.11.

It's unfortunate that the Beignet developers weren't able to get OpenCL 2.0 support fully working for Intel graphics hardware by the end of 2016, but nevertheless the project is ongoing and more OCL2 work landed today.

While it's late in the Linux 4.10 cycle, on top of all the other features/changes for Linux 4.10, Intel developer Len Brown is seeking to land updates to the in-tree turbostat utility.

Intel developers are weighing again the possibility of enabling frame-buffer compression (FBC) support by default for Skylake graphics hardware and newer.

For users of libav, the latest development code now supports hardware-accelerated HEVC/H.265 video decoding with the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).

In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week's Dota 2 7.00 game release.

Intel's Mesa driver has wired in support for two more OpenGL extensions not part of an official OpenGL specification release. These two new extensions are supported for Skylake and newer.

There have been some rare updates today to the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver, including the addition of the PCI IDs for supporting next year's Geminilake hardware.

A set of 27 patches published this week for GBM and the Intel Mesa driver provide for significant bandwidth savings.

Intel had already sent in two feature pull requests of new features/changes improvements to their DRM driver for Linux 4.10 (pull requests one and two) while now another feature pull has been submitted and there's also expected to be a last-minute fourth pull request.

Last week I published some fresh Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks of AMD/NVIDIA GPUs in AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL and Vulkan, but for those wanting some fresh Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux numbers, I have some fresh data to share this evening.

For those curious about the Intel Skylake graphics performance between Mesa 12.0 and now, here are some fresh Git OpenGL benchmarks.

It's been a busy week for Intel's open-source developers working on their Vulkan "ANV" Linux driver with a number of the recent patch series having been merged a short time ago into mainline Mesa Git.

After a number of commits landed in mainline Mesa Git in the early hours of this morning, cull and clip distance support has been enabled for the open-source Intel Vulkan "ANV" Linux driver.

Building off the input attachments work earlier this week for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver (covered in More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending), there are now patches up for review to implement support for fast clears.

It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver.

Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes.