Intel News Archives

The Intel Platform Environment Control Interface (PECI) changes have been prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle and include extending support for including 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" server platforms.

Intel engineers are working on enhancing the x86_64 CPU microcode updating experience under Linux and in particular the work is ultimately around better supporting of late microcode loading on Linux for Intel systems with a primary focus on Intel servers / enterprise users.

In addition to all the interesting open-source graphics driver updates coming with Linux 6.6 like AMD FreeSync Panel Replay, Nouveau uAPI additions for NVK, Intel PSR for old laptops, and many other GPU driver changes, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with its AI accelerator "accel" framework/subsystem is rolling out initial support for the VPU4 coming with Intel Lunar Lake processors.

Last year the DisplayPort 2.1 specification was published and now Intel's open-source Linux engineers are working on adding support to the kernel for handling of the DisplayPort Alternate Mode 2.1 support for that DP operation over USB Type-C connections.

Sent out today was the drm-intel-gt-next and drm-intel-next pull requests of the latest Intel graphics driver feature code for DRM-Next to then be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Both pull requests indicate these are the last planned feature updates ahead of Linux 6.6 but what's interesting is that with the latest code upcoming Meteor Lake graphics are still being treated as experimental.

Intel Arc Graphics customers have been eager to see the new Xe DRM kernel driver merged as a modern alternative to the long-standing i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe driver should allow for better performance, is focused just on recent Intel graphics hardware, makes use of modern kernel features, and will allow for new features such as around the Vulkan sparse support. One of the blockers for getting the Xe driver merged at least in experimental form is getting the necessary DRM scheduler changes merged.

As part of Intel's ongoing AI push, the company announced today they have joined the PyTorch Foundation as a premier member.

In addition to Intel posting initial AVX10.1 patches for the GCC compiler, Intel has also begun sorting out their AVX10 plans for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack.

The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree has seen a set of patches prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. Arguably most interesting with this updated Intel Speed Select tool is now the ability to work with more than eight CPU sockets per platform -- the new limit is 32.

In addition to the Linux kernel patches for GDS/Downfall for reporting the mitigated state and handling around Intel's latest speculative execution vulnerability, the updated CPU microcode has now been published on GitHub. In addition to having the Downfall mitigations for Skylake through Icelake/Tigerlake, there are also other security updates and functional issues resolved by this Intel 20230808 CPU microcode release.

Last month Intel announced APX and AVX10 as the successor to AVX-512 that will see both P and E cores in the future supporting this updated Advanced Vector Extensions implementation. Delightfully, today Intel engineers began posting GCC compiler patches for beginning to enable AVX10 support.

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game.

Back in Linux 6.4 there were Intel HD audio additions for Lunar Lake processors, ACE2.x integration with Lunar Lake has also been worked on as part of the SoundWire support, and also early preparations on the Sound Open Firmware side. With Linux 6.6 there are more audio bits coming together for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors.

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance.

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support.

It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops.

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake.

Intel has published their latest quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver open-source VA-API implementation as well as to their oneVPL video processing layer library.

Since last year Intel Linux engineers have been busy working on FRED support for the Flexible Return and Event Delivery specification that will be found with future-generation processors. FRED overhauls how CPU transitions are handled between privilege levels and a design goal of lowering transition latencies and allow for more robust software use-cases.

Intel today released Embree 4.2 as the newest feature update to this open-source and high performance ray-tracing library. While Embree has long offered fast CPU-based ray-tracing support, Embree 4.0 introduced GPU acceleration via SYCL. With the Embree 4.2 release, the GPU SYCL support is no longer being treated as beta.

With the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" IP block for computer vision and deep learning use-cases to provide better performance. Earlier this year with Linux 6.3 the iVPU driver was merged. Meteor Lake processors haven't even officially launched yet while already Intel's open-source engineers have begun enabling the next-gen VPU to be found with Lunar Lake processors.

A new per-application workaround/optimization to the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has sharply reduced the time required for compiling Cyberpunk 2077 game shaders for this popular title running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play.

Announced in early June by Intel-owned Codeplay Software was the oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL codebases to new processor/accelerator architectures with an emphasis on AI and HPC. Today marks the release already of the oneAPI Construction Kit 3.0.

Going along with Intel adding Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support to the GCC compiler, Intel has also now contributed the new ISA extensions for these future processors to the GNU Assembler "Gas" support as part of their early compiler toolchain enablement.

Along with detailing Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Intel as effectively a footnote to that also disclosed another exciting addition to find with future Intel CPUs: AVX10. Most notably for consumer use is that AVX10 will enable AVX-512 capabilities across both Performance and Efficient core designs with hybrid processors.

Following Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and more recently Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for furthering the x86_64 CPU compute potential, Intel has now published initial details on APX: Advanced Performance Extensions.

Linux has supported Quick Assist Technology (QAT) devices from the start whether it be QAT PCIe adapters or QAT support found within select Atom and Xeon CPUs as well as the latest-generation Sapphire Rapids CPUs. Only now though with the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel is it adding a heartbeat feature for determining if a QAT device becomes unresponsive so that it can be acted upon.

Following a recent Intel Mesa driver improvement to yield ~10% better performance, another change is on the way that has the ability to boost the performance for at least one game by 12% and other games by smaller yields.

Intel has published their 2023Q2 release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel repository that holds the many different patches around Intel integrated/discrete video acceleration for use with the popular FFmpeg multimedia library. Intel engineers continue working on upstreaming their various patches to FFmpeg proper while "cartwheel-ffmpeg" is their staging area where they continue to have the latest and greatest patches available for easy consumption.

Intel announced this evening they agreed to a term sheet with ASUS for manufacturing, selling, and supporting the Next Unit of Compute (more commonly known as NUCs) from 10th to 13th generation systems and to develop future NUC system designs.

While Intel Arc Graphics continue enjoying performance optimizations with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the major limitation facing Arc Graphics on Linux right now for gamers is the lack of sparse residency support that is needed for running many newer games on Linux with Intel graphics -- particularly newer Windows D3D12 titles running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. It's been a long known limitation and will hopefully be addressed once the Intel Xe kernel driver is introduced, but at least as an interim solution there is now "fake" sparse support being implemented.

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake "RPL" code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot.

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range.

Yesterday Intel engineers sent out early compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake with adding the new instructions of AVX-VNNI-INT16, SM3, SHA512, and SM4. Today that new instruction support was complemented by a new patch out of Intel for actually adding the new Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Arrow Lake S targets to GCC.

Consulting firm 9elements sent out a set of patches this week to the peci-cputemp and dimmtemp drivers for supporting Intel Sapphire Rapids platforms, including for the up to eight socket configuration capable this generation.

Intel's Linux software engineers understand the annual GCC compiler release cadence well and acknowledge the importance of having tuned compiler support available at launch. Intel for years has tended to get their new CPU support and new ISA features upstreamed into GCC as well as LLVM/Clang well ahead of product launch so that by the time their new consumer and server CPUs are shipping, there tends to be support within compilers just not at their stable versions but already found in the likes of Ubuntu. With that said, today Intel engineers posted initial compiler patches for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors.

Intel this morning released their open-source Compute Runtime 23.22.26516.18 as their newest monthly update to this open-source compute stack used on Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero usage.

As a follow-up to the news last week when I pointed out that Intel has begun working on Granite Rapids D compiler support for the GNU Compiler Collection, that code has now been merged for next year's GCC 14 release.

While Intel's Linux engineers were very timely in enabling much of the Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" support for the upstream Linux kernel well ahead of the processor launch at the beginning of the year, one patch series that has continued on post-launch has been working to get the new C0.x idle states supported.

The latest iteration of Intel's cluster scheduling support for x86 hybrid P/E-core CPUs were posted on Friday in seeking to enhance the performance of some workloads under Linux when running on recent Intel Core processors.

The Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel has received a fix to an issue that could lead to inadequate CPU frequency scaling behavior when running on a hybrid processor with E cores disable.

Going back to last year Intel added Granite Rapids support to GCC 13 as part of their usual early bring-up of new product families into the GNU Compiler Collection. That initial Granite Rapids target premiered in the since-released GCC 13.1 alongside Emerald Rapids and Sierra Forest too. Hitting the GCC developers' mailing list today is initial support for Intel Granite Rapids D.

In addition to Lunar Lake sound driver support in Linux 6.5 and the recent SOF update for Sound Open Firmware for Lunar Lake, Linux 6.5 is also bringing initial SoundWire Intel ACE2.x support that is part of the Lunar Lake audio capabilities.

Last year the USB4 v2.0 specification was published as the next iteration of the USB4 standard. USB4 v2 supports 80 Gbps transfer rates with USB Type-C active cables and the ability to handle up to 120 Gbps in one direction and 40 Gbps for the other direction. Intel is contributing initial support for USB4 v2 to the Linux 6.5 kernel along with initial enablement on their new Intel Barlow Ridge discrete controller.

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 was released on Thursday for this Intel-started open-source software project for having a fully open audio DSP firmware stack and related development tooling. While initially limited to Intel hardware support, SOF has since grown and seen support from the likes of Mediatek, Realtek, NXP, and even recent AMD SoCs.

For months there have been rumors whether Intel would cancel Meteor Lake-S desktop processors and leave next-generation Core desktop CPUs solely to a Raptor Lake Refresh or rumors as well Meteor Lake-S would be just for lower-end Core i3 and Core i5 level processors. Whatever Intel ends up doing, their Linux engineers continue pushing Meteor Lake-S related code into the Linux kernel.

The in-development Linux 6.5 kernel is shifting to initializing the x86 floating-point unit (FPU) initialization later in the boot process as part of a broader effort for trying to clean-up the Linux kernel boot process at least on x86/x86_64 systems.

Ingo Molnar submitted today the scheduler updates destined for the Linux 6.5 kernel. Most noticeable with the CPU scheduler changes are enhancing SMP (Hyper Threading) load balancing for Intel Core CPUs of a hybrid design with a mix of P and E cores.

With the latest Mesa 23.2 code as of Friday there is now a rather significant performance optimization for Intel's graphics driver stack that really helps out Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist along with upcoming Meteor Lake graphics. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example, was found to be 11% faster now with this single driver change and other Vulkan apps/games benefiting as well.

Earlier this year Intel software engineers published a blazing fast AVX-512 sorting library that was initially picked up by Numpy where it netted them 10~17x faster sorts. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 2.0 with even more AVX-512 features in place and additional sorting algorithms added.