AMD Radeon "Aldebaran" GPU Support Published For Next-Gen CDNA

Last week I noted "GFX90A" appearing in the AMD LLVM back-end and now the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver patches have appeared for "Aldebaran" that appear to be the codename for the next-generation CDNA part making use of GFX90A.

A set of 159 patches were just posted today for the Radeon Aldebaran enablement. The kernel patches indeed confirm this being GFX9 / GFX90A, putting it as CDNA rather than Navi/RDNA as is the case with GFX10. Aldebaran is likely the successor to the Radeon Instinct MI100. Other takeaways and signs of Aldebaran being the Arcturus (MI100) successor include XGMI support, among other features aligning it for HPC like RAS and watchdog support.

Most exciting with GFX90A that we have seen is it will support full-rate FP64. Aldebaran has VCN 2.6 video encode capabilities.

Another new feature outlined by the enablement patches is the performance determinism. "Performance Determinism is a new mode in Aldebaran where PMFW tries to maintain sustained performance level. It can be enabled on a per-die basis on aldebaran. To guarantee that it remains within the power cap, a max GFX frequency needs to be specified in this mode. A new power_dpm_force_performance_level, "perf_determinism", is defined to enable this mode in amdgpu. "

Three new PCI IDs are added for Aldebaran but they do not necessarily correspond to three SKUs definitively being launched but some may be reserved for future but unplanned variants or engineering models.

Digging through all the patches now but they can be found on amd-gfx.

There are 132k lines of code added but as usual most of that is automated register headers.