Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Intel NPU Driver Being Updated To Handle Larger AI Workloads
Intel NPU Driver Being Updated To Handle Larger AI Workloads
5 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel IVPU Linux Driver - 1 Comment

Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads.

Exploring The Zen 5 SMT Performance With The AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" CPU
Exploring The Zen 5 SMT Performance With The AMD EPYC 9755 "Turin" CPU
8 Hours Ago - Processors - 10 Comments

Continuing on with the testing around the AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors, today is a look at the Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) performance impact for Turin while using the AMD EPYC 9755 as the highest-end "Turin Classic" processor with 128 cores / 256 threads. Similar SMT on/off tests for "Turin Dense" with the EPYC 9965 192-core / 384-thread will also be coming in a future benchmarking comparison on Phoronix. These tests are mainly intended for reference purposes for those curious about the SMT benefits at such high core counts and what workloads may or may not still benefit from SMT especially when having so many threads while using 12-channel DDR5-6000 memory.

Red Hat Engineer Nikita Popov Now The Lead Maintainer For LLVM
Red Hat Engineer Nikita Popov Now The Lead Maintainer For LLVM
11 Hours Ago - LLVM - LLVM Lead Maintainer - 19 Comments

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.

Linux 6.13 To Introduce Intel 5th Gen NPU Support For Panther Lake
Linux 6.13 To Introduce Intel 5th Gen NPU Support For Panther Lake
13 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel 5th Gen NPU In iVPU - 1 Comment

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

16 October

Intel Lunar Lake vs. AMD Strix Point Platform Profile Performance Comparison
Intel Lunar Lake vs. AMD Strix Point Platform Profile Performance Comparison
16 October 11:30 AM EDT - Computers - 7 Comments

For those that have been eager to see more Intel Core Ultra Series 200V Lunar Lake Linux testing, here is the latest installment of testing as well as an update from Intel following my Lunar Lake Linux testing recent reports. Today's article is looking at Intel Lunar Lake versus AMD Strix Point across different ACPI Platform Profile configurations for whether you are after peak performance or the most power savings.

GCC Preparing To Set C23 "GNU23" As Default C Language Version
GCC Preparing To Set C23 "GNU23" As Default C Language Version
16 October 10:15 AM EDT - GNU - -std=gnu23 - 9 Comments

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2 Brings AMD ROCm + Instinct Tech Preview
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2 Brings AMD ROCm + Instinct Tech Preview
16 October 10:00 AM EDT - Red Hat - RHEL AI 1.2 - 4 Comments

Red Hat has announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2. RHEL AI was announced earlier this year as Red Hat's AI solution for a foundation model platform to develop / test / run Granite GenAI models. Not to be confused with the RHEL operating system itself, RHEL AI is all about building large language models for enterprise software with Granite LLMs and InstructLab tooling.

Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.8 Brings New Features
Intel Low Power Mode Daemon v0.0.8 Brings New Features
16 October 06:33 AM EDT - Intel - Intel LPMD v0.0.8 - 3 Comments

The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor.

15 October

Python 3.14 Alpha 1 Released With Early Changes
Python 3.14 Alpha 1 Released With Early Changes
15 October 08:38 PM EDT - Programming - Python 3.14 - 2 Comments

It was just last week that Python 3.13 saw its official release with many great features from a new interactive interpreter to an experimental JIT and removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental free-threaded build mode. Python 3.14 Alpha 1 is already out today in the first very early stage development milestone toward next year's big Python update.

VKD3D-Proton Has Been Working On Emulating D3D12 Work Graphs, But The Tech Disappoints
VKD3D-Proton Has Been Working On Emulating D3D12 Work Graphs, But The Tech Disappoints
15 October 02:34 PM EDT - Valve - Direct3D Work Graphs - 20 Comments

Back in March for GDC, Microsoft excitingly announced the official releases of Direct3D 12 Work Graphs for "enabling new types of GPU autonomy" for allowing more rendering work to be offloaded to the GPU. While this greater GPU-driven rendering with Work Graphs has been talked up by Microsoft and other parties, Valve engineers working on VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12 over Vulkan have found the new Work Graphs functionality to not be as nearly captivating.

Intel & AMD Form An x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group
Intel & AMD Form An x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group
15 October 01:46 PM EDT - Intel - x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group - 122 Comments

Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD AOCC 5.0 Compiler On 5th Gen EPYC
Initial Benchmarks Of The AMD AOCC 5.0 Compiler On 5th Gen EPYC
15 October 11:00 AM EDT - Software - 15 Comments

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, on the same day AOCC 5.0 was quietly released as the newest version of AMD's Zen-focused compiler derived from LLVM/Clang. With not only adding AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support but also additional vectorization improvements and other performance optimizations, I was eager to run some benchmarks of AOCC 5.0 against the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers. Here are those initial benchmarks using dual AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 processors.

Unvanquished Working On OpenGL 4.6 Renderer Support
Unvanquished Working On OpenGL 4.6 Renderer Support
15 October 06:38 AM EDT - Linux Gaming - Unvanquished + OpenGL 4.6 - 7 Comments

It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.

ARM64 SMT Control Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
ARM64 SMT Control Patches Updated For The Linux Kernel
15 October 06:25 AM EDT - Arm - Toggling SMT On ARM - 1 Comment

While ARM-based SoCs with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) aren't too common, there do exist some such as select models of the Huawei Kunpeng server SoC with SMT or there HiSilicon Kirin 9000S. As such Huawei/HiSilicon engineers have been working to expose SMT controls on ARM64 for the Linux kernel.

14 October

NVIDIA Is Helping To Improve Linux's Dynamic Display Mux Support For Laptops
NVIDIA Is Helping To Improve Linux's Dynamic Display Mux Support For Laptops
14 October 01:00 PM EDT - NVIDIA - Better Dynamic Display Mux - 26 Comments

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

AMD EPYC 9755 DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Memory Performance
AMD EPYC 9755 DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Memory Performance
14 October 10:45 AM EDT - Memory - 3 Comments

With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.

CodeWeavers Working On Better Input Device Support For Proton Gaming
CodeWeavers Working On Better Input Device Support For Proton Gaming
14 October 07:00 AM EDT - Valve - CodeWeavers - 12 Comments

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

Corsair Void Headset Driver Expected For Linux 6.13
Corsair Void Headset Driver Expected For Linux 6.13
14 October 06:40 AM EDT - Hardware - Corsair Void Headset Driver - 5 Comments

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

Llamafile 0.8.14 Introduces New CLI Chatbot Interface
Llamafile 0.8.14 Introduces New CLI Chatbot Interface
14 October 06:14 AM EDT - Programming - Llamafile 0.8.14 - 6 Comments

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

13 October

Improvements To The Ad Experience
13 October 10:00 AM EDT - Phoronix - Ad Tweaks - 48 Comments

As a result of user feedback and being able to reproduce some annoying ad experiences, particularly on mobile devices, I've been able to make some enhancements to hopefully improve the user ad experience when browsing Phoronix.

12 October

AMD XDNA Linux Driver Updated As It Nears The Upstream Kernel
12 October 09:21 AM EDT - AMD - AMDXDNA - 10 Comments

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

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