url
stringlengths 33
62
| title
stringlengths 10
115
| author
stringclasses 2
values | content
stringlengths 61
41k
| comments_count
int64 0
1.68k
| scraped_at
float64 1.76B
1.76B
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-CLZERO-Kernel
|
AMD Published Two Zen-Related Patches For The Linux Kernel
|
Michael Larabel
|
We've seen AMD already pushing open-source compiler patches for Zen and it seems they are ready to begin pushing Linux kernel changes too for their next-generation CPU architecture.
Aravind Gopalakrishnan of AMD posted two patches for Family 17h, a.k.a. Zen. The new feature patches can be found on the kernel mailing list until being mainlined. The patches are adding the CLZERO instruction so that it can be exposed via /proc/cpuinfo and adding the Scalable MCA cpuid bit.
The CLZERO instruction for Zen zero's out a 64-byte cache line specified in RAX. The Scalable MCA is described as, "MCA extensions expands existing register space for the MCE banks and also introduces a new MSR range to accommodate new banks. Future additions to AMD MCE code will first need to detect if SMCA is enabled before enabling the new features."
AMD Zen processors will begin appearing in 2016 so there will likely be more Zen-related open-source Linux patches appearing in short order.
| 13
| 1,760,719,836.49814
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Omega-2.0-Driver
|
AMD Reportedly Planning Big Driver Update For November
|
Michael Larabel
|
Reports are surfacing that AMD is planning a "special edition" driver update for November.
A year ago AMD released the Windows/Linux "Omega" driver that brought in many significant changes though the Linux results were mixed. If new information out today is accurate, AMD is planning a similar hefty update for next month.
The report seems to primarily come out of WCCFTECH while details on the expected changes are scarce. There's belief that AMD could mostly be focusing upon Microsoft Direct3D 12 improvements, which wouldn't help Linux users unless there's any shared code-paths with their forthcoming Vulkan driver.
Though as it's been a month and a half since the Catalyst 15.9 Linux release as AMD's latest beta/stable Linux graphics driver, any update would be appreciated especially with Linux 4.x kernel support and bug-fixes for the latest Steam Linux titles. Expect more information next month.
| 40
| 1,760,719,837.638279
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/H265-VAAPi-G3D-Decode
|
VA-API HEVC Decode Support Added To Gallium3D
|
Michael Larabel
|
Latest patches courtesy of AMD to Mesa implement VA-API HEVC/H.265 video decoding support for the latest Radeon GPUs.
Boyuan Zhang of AMD added HEVC decode to the VA state tracker. He also hooked up the HEVC decode for the Radeon UVD support.
That HEVC video decode support on the GPU is now in Mesa 11.1-devel for Radeon GPUs. AMD's Unified Video Decoder 6 (UVD6) adds the support for High Efficiency Video Coding, which is currently found in just the Fiji GPU and Carrizo APUs.
| 19
| 1,760,719,837.718135
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/HSAKMT-1.0-Released
|
AMD Does First Release Of HSAKMT Library As Part Of Open-Source HSA
|
Michael Larabel
|
Oded Gabbay of Red Hat has announced today the first official release of HSAKMT, an important piece of their open-source HSA Linux stack.
HSAKMT is to AMD's AMDKFD HSA kernel driver as libdrm is to Mesa and the DRM kernel drivers. HSAKMT serves as a thunk library to provide a user-space interface to the AMD HSA Linux kernel driver. AMDKFD has been present since the Linux 3.19 kernel for providing the HSA kernel functionality for Kaveri APUs and newer.
With today's release of HSAKMT 1.0, Kaveri and Carrizo APUs are supported. For those wanting to directly interact with AMD HSA from user-space can now use this library that's compatible with the AMDKFD driver going back to its mainline introduction.
The HSAKMT 1.0 release announcement was made today on xorg-announce and its change-log mentions some of the functionality exposed in this Heterogeneous System Architecture library. Development of HSAKMT is happening via this FreeDesktop.org Git repository.
| 7
| 1,760,719,839.042931
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-15.10-fglrx-Fix
|
A Fix For AMD Catalyst On Ubuntu 15.10 Is Coming
|
Michael Larabel
|
While Ubuntu 15.10 launched last week, the AMD Catalyst driver hasn't been working but that's in the process of changing.
While there's been patches for letting AMD Catalyst work on Ubuntu up through the Linux 4.2 kernel, the binary driver has ended up failing to work on Ubuntu's 4.2 kernel as found in Ubuntu 15.10. So even right now with a sudo apt-get install fglrx on Ubuntu 15.10, the driver will not work.
As reported in the earlier article, users have found the workaround to be just downgrading to the Linux 4.1 kernel where the patched Catalyst 15.9 driver then plays happy. However, this new workaround that's in the process of landing in the Wily archive, fixes the issue by building the fglrx driver's shim against GCC 4.9 rather than GCC 5.
Alberto Milone pushed a fixed driver into wily-proposed. "Add a dependency on gcc-4.9, and force fglrx to use gcc-4.9. This prevents fglrx from dying on initialisation. Credit for finding out the actual problem and for suggesting a workaround goes to David Burrows. Note: this is only a workaround, and it will be dropped as soon as a proper fix from upstream is available."
This lengthy bug report details the struggle people have faced in getting AMD's proprietary driver working on this newest Ubuntu Linux release. If you want to get your Ubuntu 15.10 box running with AMD's blob prior to the new update landing in the official Ubuntu package archive, you can follow the steps for using the driver from wily-proposed via this bug comment.
| 28
| 1,760,719,839.495664
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Open-Source-Stoney
|
AMD Publishes Open-Source "Stoney" APU Graphics Support
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD has published their initial open-source driver support for the "Stoney" APU graphics.
AMD's Alex Deucher describes Stoney as, "this patch set adds support for the new Stoney APU. Stoney is a new VI-based APU from AMD." With being part of the Volcanic Islands series, the support is added to the new AMDGPU kernel DRM driver. Stoney is derived from the latest Carrizo APU graphics but with some upgrades.
The AMD Stoney enablement includes UVD 6, VCE 3, Dynamic Power Management, etc. The PCI ID of Stoney is 0x1002.
The AMDGPU DRM enablement can be found via this patch series and hopefully will still land in time for merging into the Linux 4.4 kernel, but that's yet to be confirmed. Patches are also out for the minimal Mesa changes and xf86-video-amdgpu. There's also new Stoney firmware blobs needed for the hardware support.
| 18
| 1,760,719,840.410771
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-New-R-Series-SoCs
|
AMD Announces New R-Series Embedded SoCs
|
Michael Larabel
|
After teasing them for a few days, AMD today officially announced their new high-end embedded R-Series SoC processors. These new R-Series SoCs feature Excavator CPU cores and third-generation GCN GPUs.
These embedded processors are said to be powerful enough for 4K video playback, full HSA 1.0 certified, and support DDR4 ECC system memory (or DDR3). The Radeon GCN GPU has up to eight compute units and GPU clock speeds up to 800MHz.
As Linux is popular with AMD's embedded customers, their press release does mention support for "AMD’s all-open Linux driver including Mentor Embedded Linux from Mentor Graphics and their Sourcery CodeBench IDE development tools."
You can find out more about the new R-Series embedded SoCs from this press release.
| 19
| 1,760,719,840.874958
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-LLVM-Up-Ubuntu-15.10
|
The Impact Of Switching To Linux 4.3 + Mesa-11.1/LLVM-3.8 On Ubuntu 15.10
|
Michael Larabel
|
Yesterday I posted some performance results of a Radeon R9 290 tested on Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box. In this article are some numbers when upgrading the Ubuntu 15.10 installation to use the non-standard Linux 4.3 Git kernel as well as Mesa 11.1-devel Git that's built against LLVM 3.8 SVN for the newest open-source AMD Linux experience.
The Linux 4.3 kernel was obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel archive while the new Mesa 11.1-devel and LLVM 3.8 SVN stack is from this Launchpad PPA providing the very latest Mesa/LLVM support. It's sad that with Ubuntu 15.10, their Mesa 11.0 build is against LLVM 3.6 which means there isn't OpenGL 4.0/4.1 support with the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all Ubuntu users with a Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card or newer. Fortunately, using the aforementioned PPA makes it easy to tap the latest Mesa code while having a supported AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the necessary GL4 requirements.
Below are some of the results of Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 + Linux 4.3 + Mesa 11.1-dev with LLVM 3.8 SVN.
You can find all of this test data and plenty more Linux OpenGL benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. If you wish to support all of the Linux benchmarking work I do day in and day out, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Thanks!
| 18
| 1,760,719,842.053462
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-15.10-4.2-Cat-Not-Ready
|
Ubuntu 15.10 Is Coming This Week & AMD's Catalyst Chokes On Its Kernel
|
Michael Larabel
|
Ubuntu 15.10 is set to be released on Thursday, but those dependent upon the AMD Catalyst proprietary graphics driver for Linux gaming or the like might want to hold off on upgrading... While there is the latest Catalyst driver packaged and it's been patched to work against the Wily Werewolf's default Linux 4.2 kernel, it doesn't seem to work reliably.
As mentioned in some other articles, I've recently been working on some fresh Ubuntu 15.10 graphics benchmarks (including an Ubuntu 15.04) comparison. Now having completed some open-source AMD tests that will be published soon, I then turned to running some AMD Catalyst benchmarks; well, trying to at least.
Back in August I wrote about Ubuntu 15.10's fglrx package being patched for Linux 4.2 so I had assumed it was working well on the default kernel a few days prior to the official Wily Werewolf launch. Besides, the Linux 4.2 kernel has been out for a while now and the official Linux 4.3 release is right around the corner.
From using the stock Linux 4.2.0-16-generic x86_64 kernel on a clean Ubuntu 15.10 install, I thought at first it would just be the usual sudo apt-get install fglrx or sudo apt-get install fglrx-updates to get the accelerated graphics on the proprietary driver working, but while the fglrx kernel module will build fine, it doesn't run fine.
When booting the system with Wily's fglrx driver enabled, there was just a black screen. When remotely connecting to the system and checking out the dmesg, the fglrx blob was choking on the Linux 4.2 kernel. A bit of searching then confirmed that getting Catalyst to work on Ubuntu 15.10 is still a widespread issue with the bug reports on Launchpad, cchtml, etc. This Ubuntu Wily fglrx driver is the latest publicly available Catalyst 15.9 driver plus with kernel patches applied for the Linux 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 kernels, per the change-log.
The workaround for getting Catalyst working on Ubuntu 15.10 is to downgrade the kernel to Linux 4.1 or below. Or sticking to the open-source AMD driver, assuming you don't run into problems there either. Or just avoid upgrading to Ubuntu 15.10 until AMD releases a new Catalyst Linux driver release that fully supports through Linux 4.2.
| 65
| 1,760,719,842.380516
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-4.4-First-AMD-Pull
|
AMD Sends In First Batch Of GPU Driver Updates For Linux 4.4
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD's Alex Deucher sent in the first pull request today for DRM-Next for kernel graphics driver updates that in turn will target the Linux 4.4 kernel.
This first pull request of Linux 4.4 material for AMDGPU and Radeon DRM drivers include a few new features. However, they heavily lean in favor of new features for AMDGPU rather than the Radeon driver that supports the hardware pre-Tonga. There's about 37 patches for the AMDGPU driver while just six for the mature Radeon driver.
There are cursor fixes ported from Radeon to the AMDGPU DRM driver, the AMDGPU GPU scheduler is enabled by default, there's a number of new GPU VM debugging options, and support for new AtomBIOS opcodes. For pre-SI GPUs there is also efficiency improvements to the command stream checker. Of course, there's also fixes and other code clean-ups as part of this pull request too.
Sadly, not part of this pull request is power management / re-clocking for discrete GPUs on the AMDGPU driver, such as the Fiji and Tonga GPUs, which is leading to slow open-source performance right now for these newer AMD GPUs.
This initial Linux 4.4 Radeon/AMDGPU pull request can be found via this mailing list post.
| 3
| 1,760,719,843.477608
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Phil-Rogers-Leaves
|
AMD Loses A Corporate Fellow, HSA Expert To NVIDIA
|
Michael Larabel
|
It was just last month that legendary CPU designer Jim Keller left AMD and now the company is taking another blow with another high level departure. This time they're losing a corporate fellow and the former president of the HSA Foundation.
Phil Rogers, the AMD Corporate Fellow that's been leading the software side of AMD's heterogeneous computing products and HSA, has defected to NVIDIA. Rogers was also a major force behind the HSA Foundation and its president until he left AMD.
Rogers was a 20+ year veteran of AMD/ATI while now he'll be at NVIDIA as their Chief Software Architect of Compute Server.
More commentary on this latest AMD departure over at Fudzilla.com.
| 45
| 1,760,719,843.841262
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Devs-Behind-The-Scenes
|
AMD Has More Developers Working On Their Open-Source Driver Behind The Scenes
|
Michael Larabel
|
While there's just a handful of names that Phoronix readers are familiar with when it comes to AMD's open-source Linux driver developers and those from AMD who communicate with the community in our forums, it turns out there are many more developers at AMD becoming involved as part of their new AMDGPU driver stack.
In the recent article There's A Lot Of Exciting AMDGPU DRM Code Brewing For Eventual Catalyst Support, I mentioned that appearing as the patch author on many of these new, experimental patches was Harry Wentland. He isn't a name we haven't seen much of before in terms of open-source AMD contributions, but as then pointed out in the comments in our forums and in an email I received from an AMD developer, there are more people actually involved and Harry is just serving as the public face for these new patches.
Harry also commented in our forums, "There's actually a whole team working on this. I just volunteered to be the public face, at least for the initial push. On [a Git branch] you can see patches from others on the team."
Besides the usual contributors like Alex Deucher, Michel Dänzer, and Christian König, other active contributors now to the AMDGPU kernel driver also include:
- Anatoli Antonovitch
- Mykola Lysenko
- Andrey Grodzovsky
- Mohammad Mohammadnia
- Jordan Lazare
- Leo Liu
- Ken Xue
- Eagle Yeh
- Harry Wentland
- Bas Nieuwenhuizen
- Monk Liu
- David Rokhvarg
- Maruthi Srinivas Bayyavarapu
- Xiangliang Yu
- Clark Zheng
- Wan ZongShun
- Sonny Jiang
- Ben Goz
- Maninder Singh
And others.
It's great to see more at AMD involved in the AMDGPU driver for supporting the Radeon Carrizo/Tonga/Fiji and all future GPUs. Of course, it makes sense that more developers become involved so that this kernel driver can get into shape so that it's also suitable for use by the Catalyst Linux driver when this binary blob becomes isolated to user-space and relies upon this shared DRM driver. The open-source Linux graphics driver stack being assembled there is one of the shining lights at the company right now, albeit given the small Linux market-share, is unlikely to do too much to help their bottom line.
| 31
| 1,760,719,845.61512
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-Iceland-Experimental
|
AMD Makes Open-Source "Iceland" GPU Support Experimental In Linux 4.3
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD sent in a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU kernel driver today for Linux 4.3. One notable change with this AMDGPU DRM driver update is that it marks the Iceland/Topaz graphics processor support as experimental so it's no longer enabled by default until the support has been better vetted.
Resulting from this bug report about a Radeon R7 M260/M265 mobile graphics processor having unusable rendering support by the open-source driver and not working correctly, all Iceland GPU support provided by the AMDGPU driver is now marked as experimental.
While the hardware enablement code is there, Alex Deucher commented that "we haven't really tested [the Topaz GPUs] much" so it's better to just mark the support as experimental until AMD's open-source staff finds the time to fix the problems. The affected PCI IDs are 0x6900, 0x6901, 0x6902, 0x6903, and 0x6907 for the Topaz/Iceland GPUs that are now marked as experimental.
If you have a Topaz GPU in your system and want to attempt to use the AMDGPU support anyways on Linux 4.3, the amdgpu.exp_hw_support=1 module parameter needs to be used to override the experimental support flag. This shouldn't be too much of a big deal since the Topaz GPU is just used by a limited number of mobile Radeon graphics laptops.
The other fixes in today's AMDGPU pull request can be found here.
| 2
| 1,760,719,847.077353
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-znver1-GCC-Ready
|
AMD Is Ready To Land Zen Processor Support In The GCC Compiler
|
Michael Larabel
|
Back in March was a patch enabling next-generation AMD Zen processor support for GCC and now it looks like this patch is ready to be added to the GNU Compiler Collect's trunk code-base for GCC 6.
AMD's Venkataramanan Kumar sent out the znver1 enablement patch for Zen again this past week on the GCC mailing list. The patch adds the new "znver1" AMD Family 17h Zen processor support while for now the costs and tuning tables are copied from GCC's "bdver4" Excavator and there's still some adjustments to be done to the scheduler.
That latest patch can be found on gcc-patches and since then upstream GCC developers have responded that the patch looks okay for landing into trunk, meaning it will be in their mainline development code-base that will turn into GCC 6.1 next year.
AMD Zen CPUs are detected in the GCC patch by the presence of the CLZERO instruction, which is new to the hardware. CLZERO zeroes out the 64-byte cache line specified in the RAX. GCC's AMD Zen znver1 targeting with this patch exposes the BMI, BMI2, F16C, FMA, FSGSBASE, AVX, AVX2, ADCX, RDSEED, MWAITX, SHA, CLZERO, AES, PCL_MUL, CX16, MOVBE, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, ABM, XSAVEC, XSAVES, CLFLUSHOPT, and POPCNT instruction set extensions.
AMD Zen hardware is expected to be available in 2016 and will largely make or break AMD's financial outlook going forward. Zen was designed in part by legendary CPU designer Jim Keller who once again left AMD last month. Compared to Bulldozer, Zen is focused on greater per-core performance and will utilize an SMT design.
| 18
| 1,760,719,847.087148
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Drops-Another-500-Heads
|
AMD Dismisses Another 5% Of Its Workforce
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD hasn't gotten lucky financially speaking in quite a while and their latest measure to fend off further losses is by getting rid of another 5% of its staff, or about 500 people based on their current head count of just under 10,000 employees left.
AMD is getting rid of another 500 white collar employees in order to save around $58 million USD in 2016. This is just the latest of several significant changes made by Advanced Micro Devices this year in trying to better their financial outlook.
As part of this move, AMD is said to be outsourcing their internal technology support and application development groups.
Details on AMD's latest workforce reduction via WSJ.com.Hopefully Zen will be right on time next year and will be as good as anticipated...
| 70
| 1,760,719,848.368321
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Carrizo-Pro-Ships
|
AMD Announces PRO A-Series Carrizo APUs
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD has announced that their new PRO A-Series processors have begun to ship. The PRO A-Series is based on Carrizo.
The AMD PRO A-Series mobile processors are aimed at the "commercial laptop" market and will begin appearing in HP EliteBooks among other professional-oriented laptops in due time.
AMD is aiming the PRO A-Series launch as "some of the first-to-market Windows 10 equipped commercial laptop systems for businesses." Windows 10 was mentioned six times in the press release, but no sign of Linux.
The AMD PRO A12 processor is the fastest of today's line-up and has a 3.4GHz max frequency with Radeon R7 Graphics running at 800MHz and 512 compute cores.
More details on the new AMD PRO A-Series via the press release.
| 15
| 1,760,719,848.536202
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/TopWare-No-AMD-Linux
|
Some Linux Game Developers Don't Even Have Contacts At AMD
|
Michael Larabel
|
It's sad right now that we're going through a time where many new Linux game releases only work with NVIDIA graphics and flat out fail with AMD's Catalyst driver. While AMD is known to deliver game fixes several months late, making matters worse, it seems some game developers don't even know who to contact at AMD about Linux driver issues.
A Phoronix reader pointed out this comment from a developer at TopWare Interactive, a video game developer/publisher in Germany that's been around since the 90's and has worked on many titles. In answering gamer questions about the Raven's Cry game that has a Linux port, the developer commented, "unfortunatly, we are not in touch with the AMD Linux team and even have no contact."
Their current AMD Linux problem is that the game launches and it's simply a black screen when using Catalyst. NVIDIA's driver, meanwhile, renders the game flawlessly on Linux.
A common sight for AMD Linux gamers playing the latest SteamOS/Linux titles on Steam. Under Windows, the game has a system requirement of a GeForce GTX 460 or Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card. While AMD has their whole Gaming Evolved program on Windows and other initiatives for ensuring a good AMD Windows gaming experience, they sadly have no such programs on Linux, or based on these comments likely no dedicated staff for Linux game developer relations. Even when problems are reported by the community, it still tends to take several months for issues to get resolved. Heck, it took a year for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to have an AMD Catalyst application/game profile.
| 103
| 1,760,719,849.872836
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Linux-ACP-Audio
|
AMD Releases New Open-Source Audio Support, ACP Driver
|
Michael Larabel
|
ASoC audio support patches have been published for AMD GPUs.
Alex Deucher sent out the new Radeon audio patches today while the actual patches were done by an AMD developer we haven't seen anything major from before: Maruthi Bayyavarapu. The five patches add ASoC support for AMD APUs and includes a new ACP (Audio Co-Processor) driver.
This patch set implements support for i2s audio and new AMD GPUs. The i2s codec is fed by a DMA engine on the GPU. To handle this we create mfd cells which we hang the i2s codec and DMA engine on. Because of this, this patch set covers two subsystems: drm and alsa. The drm patches add support for the ACP hw block which provides the DMA engine for the i2s codec. The alsa patches add the ASoC driver for the i2s codec. Since the alsa changes depend on the drm changes in this patch set as well as some other drm changes queued for 4.3, I'd like to take the alsa patches in via the drm tree. More details via this patch series.
| 12
| 1,760,719,850.017594
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Jim-Keller-Leaves-AMD-Again
|
Jim Keller Leaves AMD, Again
|
Michael Larabel
|
While AMD's forthcoming Zen CPU architecture has high hopes and was made more exciting when Jim Keller joined back AMD to work on its design, this successful CPU designer has left AMD once more.
Jim Keller was responsible for the original Athlon K7 architecture and lead architecture for the K8, back during AMD's glory days. He had left AMD to work for Apple, but had been courted back by AMD in 2012 to start work on Zen.
Today it's being reported that Jim Keller is leaving AMD and his work on Zen to "pursue other opportunities."
Zen succeeds the Excavator (4th gen Bulldozer) and focuses on better per-core performance, will be manufactured at 14nm, and other exciting rumours about Zen have been circulating for months, but Keller leaving the company prior to its launch does raise some red flags. Zen still is reportedly on track for sampling in 2016.
More details via an article over at Hexus.
| 41
| 1,760,719,851.246295
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-15.9-Out
|
AMD's Catalyst 15.9 Now Available For Linux Gamers
|
Michael Larabel
|
As expected, AMD Catalyst 15.9 has been released this afternoon for Linux desktop users!
The Catalyst 15.9 changes are the same as outlined earlier today in Catalyst 15.9 Is Imminent With Many Steam Linux Game Fixes. Catalyst 15.9 is very good news if you're dependent upon AMD's binary graphics driver, but sadly doesn't officially offer Linux 4.x kernel support yet (patches up to Linux 4.1 are available via the community) and already in the forums are a variety of complaints.
I'm in the process of running many Catalyst 15.7 vs. Catalyst 15.9 Linux OpenGL benchmarks and will have those results to share beginning tomorrow (just a few hours).
You can download Catalyst 15.9 for Linux x86/x86_64 from AMD.com. This second official Catalyst Linux driver release of the year weighs in at 172MB.
| 114
| 1,760,719,851.410169
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Catalyst-15.9-Soon
|
Catalyst 15.9 Is Imminent With Many Steam Linux Game Fixes
|
Michael Larabel
|
A long overdue Catalyst Linux update should be out soon, in fact, potentially before the day is through.
At the moment the Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver is the latest on the site, more than two months old back from 8 July. However, Catalyst 15.9 for Linux appears to be in the process of being readied for release. The believed reported fixes include:
Driver installation sometimes fails on Ubuntu 14.04.3
Company of Heroes 2 - Game crashes while running the performance test
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Corruption observed in game
DIRT Showdown - Corruption observed in game
DIRT Showdown - Game crashes after the loading screen
DOTA 2 – Application hang observed while exiting the game
AMD Catalyst Installer removing EGL links resulting in Xserver/Xorg load failure
Unable to switch desktop mode after installing AMD Catalyst driver
Renaming Counter-Strike: GO and other Steam game binary improves performanceIt's great to see DiRT Showdown, Dota 2, Company of Heroes 2, Shadow or Mordor, and other Steam Linux game fixes! These recent Steam Linux games have been plagued by apparent problems. They're also finally acknowledging the binary renaming trick for getting better performance out of select games.
Aside from these official changes, hopefully there's also other changes like support for newer versions of the Linux kernel, etc. Stay tuned for more details once the next Catalyst Linux driver release is official.
| 34
| 1,760,719,852.875979
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-R9-Nano-Reviews
|
R9 Nano Reviews Tip Up, But Will Be Not Too Useful For Linux Gamers Right Now
|
Michael Larabel
|
At the end of August AMD paper-launched the Radeon R9 Nano with a $650+ USD price-tag for this high-performance graphics card aimed at mini-ITX owners. The review embargo lifted this morning on the R9 Nano so there's a lot of people talking about it this morning, under Windows.
Besides the $650 USD price-tag, the R9 Nano is getting hit this morning for also having bad coil whine. However, on the plus side, this small graphics card delivers the performance of a R9 Fury (non-X) while having a 100 Watt lower TDP, albeit with $100+ more on the price-tag. That is, the performance under Windows with DirectX-focused game titles.
Those interested in Windows benchmarks of the R9 Nano can find it at the likes of AnAndTech, Bit-Tech, and Guru3D. It's a very expensive graphics card filling a niche for those Windows enthusiasts/gamers wanting very small PCs while delivering good performance.
Of course, there's no Linux tests of the R9 Nano to share this morning with no review sample being available to us. There's also an interesting exposé over at HardOCP how AMD has been messing with the Windows press and not seeding the R9 Nano to all the usual outlets over wanting "fair reviews" (a.k.a. favorable reviews).
Without testing the R9 Nano myself under Linux, I can pretty much already tell you that it will be a waste right now. The R9 Fury performs poorly with Catalyst on Linux in modern Linux OpenGL game titles and the R9 Fury on open-source is still very early. There is the initial Fiji GPU support in the Linux 4.3 kernel, but it doesn't yet contain any power management support and thus the clock speeds are stuck to their low boot frequencies. In extreme cases, the $550+ R9 Fury can be outperformed by sub-$200 NVIDIA GPUs under Linux with OpenGL. The R9 Nano is pretty much in the same boat given it's based on the Fiji GPU. My R9 Fury tests weren't from a review sample either but a card I had to buy retail due to AMD's lack of interest in Linux graphics coverage given their current state of affairs.
The only case where the AMD Catalyst Linux driver continues to do quite well is with the OpenCL compute performance on Linux. However, I don't know anyone going after building a SFF/mini-ITX PC just to do a bunch of GPGPU computing... Thus until there's either a much-improved Catalyst Linux driver or the open-source Fiji support is all squared away on the AMDGPU driver, it would be a silly purchase.
For those wanting a small graphics card that packs a performance punch and would be Linux friendly, it looks like the best bet would be the GeForce GTX 970 with there being a few compact versions like the ASUS Mini GTX 970 and Gigabyte GTX 970 Mini ITX Overclocked. These sub-$350 graphics cards are almost guaranteed to be faster than the $650+ R9 Nano for Linux OpenGL gaming based on my R9 Fury and GTX 970 Linux tests.
| 28
| 1,760,719,852.974731
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Catalyst-Two-Months-Sep-15
|
It's Been Two Months Since The Last Catalyst Linux Update
|
Michael Larabel
|
While there were Catalyst 15.7.1 and 15.8 Beta releases for Windows, AMD hasn't updated the Catalyst Linux driver with a new public release in two months, but a new one may be near.
The latest AMD Catalyst Linux driver update remains at Catalyst 15.7, which was released back on 8 July. Sadly, there's not even been any beta updates since even while new Steam Linux games continue to be released and commonly running into Catalyst problems.
In fact, AMD has only officially released two Catalyst Linux drivers this year: 15.5 and 15.7. But it's sounding like a new release should be out before September is through. On top of Steam Linux game fixes, what do you hope is in store for this next update? Share your hopes by commenting on this article in our forums.
Along with Steam Linux game fixes/optimizations for benchmark-friendly titles, I'm hoping that there will also be some broad performance optimizations for making more useful the AMD Radeon R9 Fury series on Linux. At least in the absence of Catalyst Linux updates, the open-source AMDGPU/RadeonSI stack continues maturing.
| 28
| 1,760,719,854.256553
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-VI-Firmware-Added
|
Microcode Blobs Added To Linux-Firmware For Latest AMD Hardware
|
Michael Larabel
|
The proprietary firmware files for Carrizo, Fiji, Tonga, and Topaz graphics processors from AMD have been added to the linux-firmware tree.
For the modern AMD graphics processors supported by the new AMDGPU DRM driver, their respective firmware files are now present within linux-firmware.git. For the past few months, these files were just available from Alex Deucher's personal website. Now being part of linux-firmware Git should see that they get rolled out in the next round of Linux distribution updates, etc.
These firmware files for Tonga/Fiji/Carrizo/Topaz are to be installed in /lib/firmware/amdgpu compared to the firmware files for all earlier AMD GPUs being in /lib/firmware/radeon. These files are necessary for hardware acceleration and without them the open-source AMD driver doesn't fully function. These firmware files also cover the UVD and VCE blocks to make for a full-functioning open-source driver.
It's these firmware files that have upset the GNU Linux-Libre folks. Additionally, the license on these newly-added files reads, "No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this Software is permitted."
The commit landing the AMDGPU firmware files yesterday can be found here. The Fiji open-source driver changes are landing in Linux 4.3 while the Tonga/Carrizo support is already present with the AMDGPU roll-out in Linux 4.2, as outlined in Running The AMD Radeon R9 Fury With AMD's New Driver.
Meanwhile, I still haven't seen the signed firmware files anywhere for the Maxwell GTX 900 series from NVIDIA so there can be accelerated open-source Nouveau support.
| 23
| 1,760,719,854.444916
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-APP-SDK-3.0
|
AMD APP SDK 3.0 Brings OpenCL 2.0 Support
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD announced the release this week of their proprietary APP SDK 3.0 software.
For Linux users the notable feature of APP SDK 3.0 is support for OpenCL 2.0, while the Catalyst drivers have already supported OpenCL 2.0. The new version of their accelerated Software Development Kit also adds support for Windows 10 and is officially compatible with Carrizo APUs and Fiji GPUs.
The APP SDK 3.0 is available for download on Linux 32-bit and 64-bit systems. More details via developer.amd.com.
| 1
| 1,760,719,855.910007
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Open-Next-Gen-Hope
|
AMD's Open-Source Support Might Be Caught Up For Next-Gen GPUs
|
Michael Larabel
|
If you haven't read this morning's article about Running The AMD Radeon R9 Fury With AMD's New Open-Source Linux Driver, you should go do so, but the short version is that there's still much work left before the R9 Fury "Fiji" GPUs will be a worthwhile investment by Linux users.
This turnaround time for (basic: no re-clocking or OpenGL 4) open-source Radeon R9 Fury support is coming one month after the Fury/Fiji was unveiled, but that's only in Git form: Mesa 11.0 will be formally released next month while Linux 4.3 with initial Fiji support is only starting development and won't be stable until its release in about two months. Then having the power management / re-clocking support in stable form will take another two months at least for that with Linux 4.4, if it doesn't get dragged on until 2016.
The timing situation is even worse for the AMD Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" GPU that was released last year. Due to the AMDGPU transition, it doesn't even have official support until today's Linux 4.2 kernel that is the first stable release with this new AMDGPU driver. It is bound by the same missing re-clocking / power management as Fiji, though at least Tonga is able to expose OpenGL 4.1 on par with the other RadeonSI hardware.
While AMD has been improving their turnaround time for open-source enablement up until the big AMDGPU transition, there's hope that with the next-generation GPUs they may be able to deliver it on-time.
AMD's John Bridgman commented on today's article, "IIRC we had already reached that point with CI. The transition to amdgpu took a lot of work though, and that delayed support for VI (Iceland/Topaz, Tonga, Fiji). We should be caught up again for next gen though...It's not a "number of developers" issue, just that this time we spent the developer effort for IP review earlier than usual, so rather than waiting for IP review you're waiting for the code to be written. The only point I was trying to make was that there shouldn't be anything like the usual IP delay once we have the code working internally."
The AMD Radeon Rx 400 series is expected for release in 2016 and is expected to use 14 or 16nm FinFET technology and will be the second release with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). For the next major AMD launch it will be interesting to see if by catching up that they publish the open-source driver support for launch day or if they publish it ahead of time so it can reach a stable Mesa/kernel in time for out-of-the-box support on modern Linux desktop distributions. They'll also need to be quicker for their AMDGPU DRM kernel support of new hardware if their new Catalyst-in-userspace strategy is to work out, unless they always rely on also including a DKMS version of the latest AMDGPU kernel code.
| 21
| 1,760,719,856.467366
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Carrizo-A8-7410-Linux
|
Interested In Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD "Carrizo" A8-7410?
|
Michael Larabel
|
I'm hoping to carry out some AMD Carrizo Linux performance benchmarks in the days ahead on Phoronix, are you interested?
Sadly there hasn't been much AMD Carrizo testing in the US as the hardware still seems rather hard to come by for the lower-end notebooks, AIOs, and other devices. For hardware I've seen available from my preferred Internet retailer -- Amazon -- they now have a all-in-one computer that's fallen in price to below $500 USD.
The AIO Carrizo system I've had my eye on is the Lenovo C40. This computer with 21.5-inch touchscreen display has an AMD A8-7410 Carrizo APU, 8GB of DDR3 memory, 2TB HDD, and ships with Windows by default.
With this Carrizo system now selling for $480, I'm thinking of buying it (thanks to recent Phoronix Premium subscribers!) for Linux testing. I'm primarily interested in Carrizo for doing some AMDGPU vs. Catalyst driver benchmarks since at least for Carrizo there is supposed to be working power management / re-clocking. I'm also interested in Carrizo for its Excavator CPU cores for running some CPU tests and also looking at the LLVM/Clang vs. GCC compiler performance. Those are the main focuses of interest but there's also some other interesting AMD Carrizo Linux test cases.
On the downside, the A8-7410 Carrizo SoC isn't the most impressive part out there with being a quad-core 2.5GHz (boost) SoC with Radeon R5 Graphics. However, at leas it would fall within my price range as a AMD Carrizo system to benchmark for Linux. As a Phoronix reader, what do you think of Carrizo or are looking forward to most about it? Have you seen any better deals on systems? Feel free to share your thoughts as I decided whether to go for this A8-7410 system for Linux testing in the next few days.
| 43
| 1,760,719,857.418235
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Oland-PCI-ID-Add
|
AMD Appears To Be Spinning Another Oland-Based GPU
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD's Rx 300 series line-up is largely a re-brand (with greater vRAM) of older GCN graphics cards, except for the high-end Fiji GPUs. While there's already some low-end parts in the R5/R7 300 series, it seems another one may be coming.
AMD's Alex Deucher sent out patches today adding a "new OLAND PCI ID" to the open-source RadeonSI driver stack. It's for a 0x6617 PCI ID. Google'ing, I haven't seen this PCI ID listed for a current graphics card and the patches mention this for a "new" GPU rather than a "missing" entry.
Oland is a GCN 1.0 GPU that was first found in the Radeon HD 8570/8670 for OEMs and then in the Radeon R5 240, R7 240, and R7 250. With the current generation line-up, Oland is powering the R5 330, R5 340, R7 340, and R7 350. Unless these patches warere for a missing GPU, it looks like some other Oland part is coming, which is only sad since it's GCN 1.0 and found in graphics cards for sale since 2013.
| 34
| 1,760,719,857.924013
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-EGL-1.5-Finishing-Up
|
Marek At AMD Has Been Finishing Up EGL 1.5 Support In Mesa
|
Michael Larabel
|
Marek Olšák on Sunday sent out his latest patch series with the last of the EGL 1.5 bits for those on Linux using this modern interface over GLX.
The latest patches sent out by this prolific open-source Mesa developer over the past few years add exposing sRGB visuals to the DRI Gallium3D state tracker, adding EGL_KHR_gl_colorspace support, adding support for the new features to the DRI2 render query extension, and other changes.
These needed EGL 1.5 patches for Mesa Gallium3D will hopefully land in Mesa 10.7 Git soon but for now can be found on the Mesa-dev list. EGL 1.5 was released by the Khronos Group in March of 2014.
| 16
| 1,760,719,858.874251
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-15.7-Linux-Driver-Bench
|
AMD Catalyst 15.7 Linux Benchmarks: R9 290 Hawaii & R9 285 Tonga
|
Michael Larabel
|
I'm in the midst of a new large open-source and (separately) closed-source NVIDIA/AMD Linux graphics card comparison on the latest drivers as part of an upcoming Radeon R7 370 Linux review and to be followed by R9 Fury Linux benchmarks. However, for those interested in the Catalyst 15.7 benchmarks on Linux, I ran some quick tests with a Radeon R9 285 and R9 290.
Tested was the fglrx 15.20.2 driver as packaged on Ubuntu 15.04 along with the Catalyst 15.7 driver (fglrx 15.20.3). The Catalyst 15.5 driver couldn't be tested due to issues on this system with Ubuntu 15.04. It's quite a straight-forward comparison and just this quick, one-page article.
This was the exciting result... Team Fortress 2 that improves quite a bit with this new driver update.
However, other OpenGL and OpenCL titles tested (including Linux games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Metro Last Light Redux) were unaffected with the R9 285 and R9 290. You can see all of the test results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Stay tuned for some more interesting Linux driver tests shortly.
| 61
| 1,760,719,859.243677
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Catalyst-15.7-One-Day
|
Catalyst 15.7 For Linux Is Turning Out To Be A Rather Nice Driver Update
|
Michael Larabel
|
Yesterday's Catalyst 15.7 for Linux driver update turned out to be a fairly nice driver update. Tests are still running but the new features and performance improvements are certainly welcome.
To no surprise, the dozens of comments in the forums about Catalyst 15.7 for Linux tend to be rather polarized. However, in my testing over the past day, this is actually a rather decent driver update... OpenCL 2.0 multi-device support is working, the Rx 300 series support is there (albeit late, and at least for the R7 370 I'm currently testing), and there are indeed OpenGL performance improvements.
In the comments to yesterday's article there are several individuals talking of performance improvements. Phoronix reader d2kx wrote, "I am seeing ~10% perf improvements in CSGO and ~45% perf improvements in Dota 2 Reborn with a Radeon R9 285." Phoronix reader djdoo wrote, "It is the first time I saw 76 FPS in Unigine Valley bench with Ultra settings always, 1920X1080 res, AAx4, Anisotropy x16. Overall score 1463 with these settings, whereas with 15.5 I got less than 1000 and with 14.12 less than 700."
I hope to have out my initial Catalyst 15.7 Linux graphics driver comparison with multiple Radeon GPUs out later today.
The complaints about this driver seem to boil down to it lacking support for the Linux 4.0+ kernels (even though there's been public patches for a while to support Linux 4.0), no AMDGPU kernel driver support, and various system-specific issues.
| 23
| 1,760,719,860.247036
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-15.7-Released
|
Catalyst 15.7 Bring Multi-Device Support For OpenCL 2.0, Carrizo Improvements
|
Michael Larabel
|
The Catalyst 15.7 Linux graphics driver was just released, one day longer than anticipated.
Catalyst 15.7 brings AMD PowerXpress support for Intel Skylake processors, atomics and SVM fine-grain buffer support for Carrizo APUs, and multi-device support for OpenCL 2.0. This Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver also brings support for the Radeon R9 300 Series as well as the R9 Fury X.
More details on Catalyst 15.7 for Linux via the AMD.com download page.
| 44
| 1,760,719,860.874825
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FirePro-S9170
|
AMD FirePro S9170 Rolls Out With 32GB Of GDDR5 Memory
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD announced the FirePro S9170 this morning as the first server graphics card with 32GB of memory for high performance compute.
This single-GPU GCN solution boasts 32GB of GDDR5 memory and delivers up to 5.24 TFLOPS of single-precision compute and 2.62 TFLOPS of double-precision compute performance. OpenCL 2.0 is supported while OpenMP and OpenACC developer tools are forthcoming.
More details via the press release. This should be one nice card for those with serious workloads able to take advantage of OpenCL. While the OpenGL stack in the Catalyst Linux driver is easily criticized, the compute abilities of the Catalyst Linux driver aren't to be dismissed -- it actually works, supports OpenCL 2.0, and performs well. There are some AMD/NVIDIA OpenCL Linux benchmarks done recently within this review.
| 4
| 1,760,719,863.052023
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/CSGO-TF2-370-Preview
|
A Look At CS:GO & TF2 On AMD GPUs With The Open-Source Driver
|
Michael Larabel
|
I'm in the process of running open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D tests on the new MSI Radeon R7 370 4G graphics card. That initial Linux review of the AMD Radeon R7 370 with the open-source driver will be published later this week (still waiting on an updated Catalyst driver for those proprietary driver tests). However, as an excerpt of the Gallium3D testing, here are results from some AMD graphics cards with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2.
In the testing so far has been a Radeon HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7850, R9 290, and R7 370. There will be more cards in the R7 370 Linux review along with some fresh open-source NVIDIA benchmark results. Tests were done on Linux 4.1.1 and Mesa 10.7-devel atop Ubuntu 15.04. Linux 4.2 Git couldn't be tested (plus the R9 285 with AMDGPU) since this particular test system is still plagued by the Linux 4.2 kernel panics.
With the higher-end graphics cards, the current open-source AMD Linux stack does deliver a playable CS:GO experience on Ubuntu at 1080p.
With Team Fortress 2 it's less demanding and becomes CPU bottlenecked.
As the last benchmark teaser for now, Unigine:
The benchmark results are in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Stay tuned for the full graphics card round-up in the days ahead on Phoronix.
| 14
| 1,760,719,863.88791
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Catalyst-77-Update-Expected
|
What Do You Hope To See Out Of Today's Expected Catalyst Linux Update?
|
Michael Larabel
|
It's expected that today AMD will be releasing an updated Catalyst (v15.20) Linux graphics driver. Aside from Radeon Rx 300/Fury graphics card support, what do you hope is part of this new driver series?
According to prolific Phoronix Forums contributor and AMD employee, John Bridgman, there's supposed to be out a new driver update.
With this Catalyst update we should finally see support for the new AMD GPUs that started surfacing a few weeks back. However, the changes beyond that aren't currently known... Hopefully some new Linux kernel support, bug fixes, and more Linux gaming optimizations? What do you hope is in the new driver? Any big features? Share your hopes by commenting on this article in our forums. Stay tuned to Phoronix as we should have all the details in the hours ahead.
| 42
| 1,760,719,864.484273
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Lower-Guidance
|
AMD Financials Still Pointing Lower
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD yesterday issued a warning over their second quarter guidance that they expect them to come in below expectations. Things aren't looking good with their stock price being down by another 16% so far this morning.
AMD's warning yesterday was that they expected their Q2 revenue to be down by 8% versus their earlier guidance of 3%. They blamed this on weak consumer PC demand that impacted their APU sales. Their non-GAAP gross margic is expected to be at 28% rather than 32%. They also said they expect a $33M charge relating to migrating several 20mm manufacturing designs over to FinFET designs likely on a 14 or 16nm process. More details via their press release.
AMD's stock price so far today has dropped 16% as of writing this article. As of writing this post they are at a support level just above $2.00 USD, which is already at a 52 week low. In fact, it appears to be a 5+ year low for the company.
Hopefully AMD will able to get the R9 Fury and R9 Fury Nano out the door in strong quantities out the door soon. Their new AMD Zen architecture also can't come soon enough for helping drive their APU/CPU sales, but that still looks to be at least one year away.
| 14
| 1,760,719,865.481928
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-R9-Fury-X-Short-Supply
|
It Could Be A While Before Seeing The AMD R9 Fury X Readily Available
|
Michael Larabel
|
This week AMD launched the Radeon R9 Fury X at $649 for this "Fiji" GPU with High Bandwidth Memory that's liquid cooled. The Fury X is AMD's strongest competition to NVIDIA in years, but sadly this high-end graphics card appears to be in very short supply.
As AMD hadn't sent out a review sample for Linux testing, since the launch this week I've been trying very hard to purchase the Fury X for review on Phoronix. Sadly, the graphics card count available by AMD's AIBs are quite low for launch time and it looks like it could be a few weeks before seeing them available.
One of the first Fury X cards to be listed for sale was the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury X on Amazon for the list price of $649.99. Since its listing, it's managed to become the "#1 new release in computer graphics cards" but I've yet to see it in stock and soon as it was listed I placed an order for it. As of this morning the delivery time has been updated and it doesn't appear it will ship for one to three weeks.
The XFX Radeon R9 Fury X is listed for $679 at Amazon and it has a "usually ships within 1 to 2 months." Lastly the VisionTek R9 Fury X is listed for $699 and ships in two to four weeks.
Over on NewEgg, their graphics cards have been listed as "coming soon" or "out of stock". I've added email auto notifications on those Fiji products back on launch day and have yet to see any of them in stock... But it seems NewEgg is keeping most of their Fury cards for bundles. They do have quantities of Fury X graphics cards that are in stock, but only selling them in bundles if you buy the GPU + CPU + motherboard (+ RAM) as part of a bundle.
I've been checking these Internet retailers and others every 30~60 minutes since Wednesday to no avail, sans not being tempted in buying a NewEgg Fury/CPU/mobo bundle... Hopefully the out of stock order I did on the Sapphire Fury X will manage to ship soon. If the graphics cards are indeed in short supply for 1~3 weeks, it's almost more tempting to wait until 14 July when the air-cooled version of the AMD R9 Fury will ship for $549... But there it could be another waiting game for that graphics card, which will likely be more sought after by gamers, to ship in quantities.
This game of patience at least is giving AMD time to prepare some Linux/Window driver improvements for the Fiji GPUs. On AMD.com I have yet to see a new Fury X Catalyst driver Linux driver release nor have I seen one elsewhere like in the Ubuntu package archive. There was talk of a Catalyst Linux driver potentially being on the Fury X product CDs, but I have yet to be able to confirm AIBs putting the Linux driver on their product disks. There's also not yet any open-source Fiji GPU support.
| 31
| 1,760,719,866.183869
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/ARM-Opteron-AMD-Snaps
|
ARM Posts Pictures Of AMD's New Development Board
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD's new 64-bit ARM Opteron quad-core development board coming out later this year at an "affordable" price has us quite excited since it was announced earlier this week at the Red Hat Summit. ARM has now revealed the first pictures of this board.
Here's the pictures, courtesy of ARM's Jeff Underhill:
This board is quite exciting first of all for being an affordable development board with quad-core 64-bit ARM SoC. In the information on it this week and now the pictures, it's exciting that it has two DDR3 memory slots and PCI Express x16. The picture also reveals the heatsink for the Opteron "Seattle" should be easily upgradeable.
Likely the biggest surprise is the HDMI port on the board... Apparently the AMD Opteron A1100 will feature some sort of (Radeon, presumably) graphics. This hasn't been talked about by AMD before and the earlier AMD Seattle development kits reportedly don't have any integrated graphics. We'll have to wait and see for more details.
Unfortunately, this 96Boards Enterprise Edition form factor isn't compatible with nano/mini ITX cases... Fedora ARM developer Marcin Juszkiewicz has a nice analysis of the new board's layout and it's a pity that this ARM development board won't be able to easily mount in off-the-shelf cases.
| 22
| 1,760,719,867.0056
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Low-Cost-ARM-Dev-Board
|
AMD Is Working On A Low-Cost, ARM 64-bit Opteron Development Board
|
Michael Larabel
|
Some AMD news this week that got me even more excited than the Radeon R9 Fury X launch is word that they are developing a low-cost ARM development board for release later this year. This affordable development board will feature a quad-core AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor.
AMD has some representatives in Boston this week at the Red Hat Summit for showing off their AMD Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM processor. So far the 64-bit ARM A1100 development kits have just been available in a limited capacity, but it was announced they're working with Linaro on a low-cost development board that will use one of their quad-core versions of the processor.
The AMD announcement reads, "How would you like an affordable and compact 160x120mm board to jump start your development efforts with AArch64? AMD and Linaro have been collaborating to develop a 96Boards Enterprise Edition (EE) specification that is ideal for the individual developer. Targeting the server and networking markets, the board will feature a 4-core AMD Opteron A1100 Series processor with two SO-DIMM memory slots, PCIe, USB, SATA, and Gigabit Ethernet capabilities. Popular operating systems such as CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview are targeted for use with this particular board. Additional software downloads, updates, and a forum for software developers will be available via the 96Boards web site. The board is slated to be available in 2H 2015 from distribution partners worldwide and it will be supported through the Linaro Enterprise Group’s 96Boards.org site."
This is quite exciting and is better than the other AArch64 96Boards thus far. I certainly can't wait to get my hands on this quad-core 64-bit ARM Opteron development board! It's also nice it will feature SO-DIMM slots for upgradeable system memory.
More details as they become available.
| 21
| 1,760,719,868.181602
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Split-Possible-Report
|
AMD Reportedly Looking At Breaking Itself Up Or Other Options
|
Michael Larabel
|
According to an exclusive report by Reuters, AMD is reportedly looking at splitting itself up or spinning off one of its business units.
With AMD's financial position still being rather lackluster, AMD is reportedly considering possibilities that could involve splitting up the company or spinning off a business unit. The report issued by Reuters this Friday evening explains, "The deliberations are preliminary and no decision has been made, the people said. The review highlights Chief Executive Lisa Su's determination to consider every possible option to turn the company around. AMD has asked a consulting firm to help it review its options and draw up scenarios on how a break-up or spin-off would work, the people said this week, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. One option under consideration is separating AMD's graphics and licensing business from its server business, which sells processors that power data centers, one of the people said."
Before getting too excited, "AMD had explored such a move in the past and decided against it, the people said. Su, however, who took over as CEO last October, judged that there is merit for the company to at least consider such a possibility again, the people added. There is no certainty that a split or spin-off will occur, the people cautioned."
| 53
| 1,760,719,868.522214
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SPIR-V-Updated-Plans-LLVM
|
Updated Plans For Adding SPIR-V Support To LLVM
|
Michael Larabel
|
SPIR-V, the heart of OpenCL 2.1+ and The Khronos Group's forthcoming Vulkan specification, is a step closer to being worked on within the LLVM compiler stack.
Last month I wrote about an AMD developer figuring out plans for SPIR-V support in LLVM as since the announcement of this new intermediate representation there's been talk of having a converter to translate SPIR-V to/from LLVM IR so there's interoperability with existing LLVM components and back-ends. Yaxun Liu of AMD has provided an update today on this SPIR-V target support within LLVM.
The message contains the revised proposal for the LLVM/SPIR-V converter. In order to allow developers to use Clang to compile OpenCL kernels into SPIR-V binaries, the overall approach remains the same for breaking down the LLVM IR into instructions that are represented by LLVM-IR. The first milestone for the involved developers is adding support for compiling an OpenCL 1.2/2.0 kernel to SPIR-V for this new target via Clang. Work will follow in adding an OpenCL 2.1 C++ front-end for Clang. Following bringing up OpenCL kernels in SPIR-V, work would then be focused on adding GLSL front-end support and supporting the SPIR-V instructions relevant specifically to graphics. Once that's all done, the SPIR-V back-end would hopefully be fully compliant with the forthcoming SPIR-V 1.0 specification.
Besides AMD, other SPIR working group members will also be working on this bi-way converter, including Intel and others that have stakes in LLVM's OpenCL support.
| 0
| 1,760,719,869.920365
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Vulkan-GDC-Europe
|
AMD To Talk About Vulkan-DirectX 12 Similarities At GDC Europe
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD will be talking about Vulkan and DirectX 12 -- and what they have in common as next-gen graphics APIs -- during GDC Europe in Cologne, Germany.
Coming across The Khronos Group news feed this morning was the announcement of the AMD event at GDC Europe to talk about Vulkan. "Vulkan and DirectX®12 share many common concepts, and can offer significant performance boosts, including lower API overhead, full muti-threading support, asynchronous compute, and more, but differ vastly from the APIs most game developers are used to. As a result, developing for DX12 or Vulkan requires a new approach to graphics programming and in many cases a re-design of the Game Engine."
The unofficial rumor at the moment remains that Khronos Group seems likely to unveil the formal Vulkan specification at SIGGRAPH in August. SIGGRAPH 2015 runs from 9 to 13 August in Los Angeles but who knows what we'll see the week before in Germany at GDC Europe or if there will be any early surprises.
| 35
| 1,760,719,870.805447
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-HSA-GCC-Improvements
|
SUSE Continues Working On AMD HSA Support In GCC
|
Michael Larabel
|
SUSE in cooperation with AMD continues working on the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support inside the GCC compiler stack.
Going back a while now, AMD has been working with SUSE on adding HSA support to GCC. Some of the work has landed in GCC while more additions are still pending -- including some newly-published patches.
Last week SUSE's Martin Jambor published support for integrating HSA into the existing accelerator framework as a libgomp plug-in. "the big patch below brings HSA substantially closer to nice co-existence with the existing accelerator framework in trunk. Above all, it implements a libgomp plugin, and with this patch applied, the branch uses it to run the target constructs of OpenMP 4. While there may be mistakes, I hope that the plugin already implements all that is necessary and should be very close to the version I will propose for inclusion to trunk late in the summer."
This HSA support as a libgomp plug-in would expose it as an offload target alongside the Intel MIC / Xeon Phi with OpenMP and NVIDIA PTX with OpenACC. The GCC offloading support came together with GCC 5 while more improvements -- and this latest work -- will come next year with GCC 6. Those unfamiliar with the current GCC Offloading support can see this Wiki page.
Martin also published a new patch today for supporting HSA vector immediates.
It's great to see the HSA GCC support coming together albeit taking longer than anticipated with originally it looking like open-source HSA would be usable around the end of 2014. Outside of the compiler stack, the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver continues to be improved as well as the AMD GPU LLVM back-end, the Clover/OpenCL stack in Gallium3D, etc.
| 7
| 1,760,719,871.65295
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-OpenGL-4.5
|
Next AMD Catalyst Linux Update Appears To Have OpenGL 4.5
|
Michael Larabel
|
While OpenGL 4.5 has been out since last August, it appears the next AMD Catalyst driver update will finally bring official support for OpenGL 4.5.
Right now the AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver only advertises OpenGL 4.4 support, but it appears with the next series -- fglrx 15.30 -- GL4.5 will be fully worked out.
Frequent Phoronix reader d2kx pointed out on the new AMD product page following AMD's big Fury/Fiji announcements today that there is reference to OpenGL 4.5
Footnote number eight reads, "OpenGL 4.5 support available in AMD Catalyst 15.30 WHQL driver." While "WHQL" is in reference to Windows, usually the AMD Windows and Linux drivers share the same OpenGL support level. Given today's hardware announcements, the next Catalyst driver release should be out quite soon.
| 12
| 1,760,719,872.363423
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-R9-Fury-Nano-300-Launch
|
AMD Announces The Rx 300 Series, Fiji-Based Fury X, R9 Nano, Project Quantum
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD announced their Radeon Rx 300 series line-up just now via an event in Los Angeles that was live-streamed on Twitch.
The R7 300 series is the Radeon R7 360 for entry-level online gaming (as low as $109 USD) and Radeon R7 370 for $149.The Radeon R9 300 series is made-up of the Radeon R9 380 at $199+, Radeon R9 390 at $329+, and Radeon R9 390X and $429+.
The Fiji-based GPUs are under the Fury marketing name as has been known for a while now. The Fiji GPUs boast the much talked about High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and are AMD's most complex yet efficient GPUs to date. The Radeon R9 Fury X is geared for 4K and 5K gaming and is 1.5x performance-per-Watt over the Radeon R9 290X. The Radeon R9 Fury X is water-cooled while the Radeon R9 Fury is air-cooled. The Fury X has 8.9 billion transistors and has a 275 Watt TDP.The Fury X will start being sold later this month for $649+ while the Fury will sell in July starting for $549. The R9 Nano and a dual-Fiji GPU will come later in the year.
The Radeon R9 Nano is another new, very small graphics card with Fiji HBM all in a six-inch size while delivering 2x the performance-per-Watt performance of the R9 290X.
New features for the Rx 300 series: Frame-Rate Target Control (FRTC) to limit rendering performance when the target is reached to avoid rendering unnecessary frames. Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) for rendering games at higher resolutions and then down-scaling to your monitor's panel resolution. No word on Linux driver support for these new gaming-oriented features.
DirectX 12 was mentioned extensively during the hour-long presentation -- including DX12 demos -- while Vulkan received a few mentions. Linux (and anything open-source related) received no mentions.
Project Quantum is AMD's new ultra small form factor console with dual Fiji GPUs. AMD will be bringing this powerful PC to the market with their partners in the near future, but no word if SteamOS/Linux option, etc.
As of writing I've yet to receive any Rx 300 series review samples for Linux testing at Phoronix nor has AMD's marketing representatives said whether that will happen. Though if it's like the earlier GCN launches and unlike the older days, I'll likely end up having to buy the graphics cards retail once they're available on Thursday in order to provide Linux tests. Stay tuned... If you appreciate the Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip; I hope there's enough support in being able to deliver Linux tests of one of the AMD Fury graphics card models.
Assuming the Rx 300 driver situation is like past launches, AMD will soon released a new Catalyst Linux driver (beta) for supporting the new hardware but it will be interesting to see how the performance is under Linux with OpenGL given that the current Rx 200 series hardware has various performance issues and problems with different Steam Linux games, etc.
The open-source support story will be different and likely won't be widely-available and in good standing for Linux users until the fall. Only with the upcoming Linux 4.2 kernel is there the new AMDGPU kernel driver needed for supporting this new hardware (along with the existing Tonga GPU family). Beyond needing Linux 4.2, there's also the new xf86-video-amdgpu DDX, the latest LLVM code, and yet-to-be-merged Mesa support code. If you're running Arch Linux or another rolling-release distribution you might be getting sufficient support soon, but Fedora/Ubuntu-type users won't see good support until at least the fall summer releases. I will be running some Git tests with the R9 285 and Rx 300 series hardware as soon as Linux 4.2 starts stabilizing. As one caveat, it appears the AMDGPU driver for Linux 4.2 doesn't support the Fury/Fiji graphics cards, so that support might be staved off until Linux 4.3 or longer.
| 68
| 1,760,719,873.073089
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-KERNCZ-Linux-Support
|
AMD "KERNCZ" Chipset Support Is Being Worked On For Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD KERNCZ is a new generation name for an AMD chipset / FCH (Fusion Controller Hub).
We haven't heard AMD talk about KERNCZ or see it mentioned elsewhere outside of Linux kernel enablement patches. Based upon current timing and these patches just appearing recently, I would guess that KERNCZ would be the chipset for next-generation AMD Zen processors. Back in March we saw AMD begin with public Linux/open-source enablement patches around Zen and its new CPU micro-architecture.
So far when it comes to AMD KERNCZ Linux patches there was device ID support posted yesterday, "The KERNCZ is new AMD SB/FCH generation name, like HUDSON2. We will adopt 0x790b as device ID since from this gereration." Going into Linux 4.1 already was KERNCZ GPIO support. There's also been a few other KERNCZ patches floating about.
Given the current state of Linux 4.1 development and the limited patches out there thus far, the KERNCZ Linux support will likely get ironed out around the Linux 4.2~4.3 kernel releases.
| 4
| 1,760,719,873.676925
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Carrizo-Launch
|
AMD's Carrizo Launches: New Laptops In The Weeks Ahead
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD launched Carrizo today from Computex Taipei and with the rollout they've unveiled the rest of the details on the new A-Series APU design.
Some new details revealed by AMD about Carrizo include the Excavator CPU cores having a new and larger L1 data cache design, AVX2 / MOVBE / SMEP / BMI1 / BMI2 instruction support, new low-power modes, low-power video playback support, H.265 / HEVC video decode support (no word about VP9), and other power-related enhancements.
When it comes to the Radeon GCN GPU on Carrizo there's eight GCN cores, DirectX 12 Level 12 support, better tessellation performance, updated ISA, full HSA acceleration support, etc.
Carrizo will be packing a lot of performance for low-power laptop designs beginning late June or early July. Stay tuned for more details and benchmarks to come once I get my hands on an AMD Carrizo laptop in the weeks ahead. You can learn more about AMD's new APUs via the new AMD.com product page.
| 13
| 1,760,719,874.406856
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-15.5-Linux
|
AMD Catalyst 15.5 Beta Linux Driver Surfaces
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD is finally out with a big Catalyst Linux driver update!
This morning was a big AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics card comparison in celebration of Phoronix turning eleven this week. Coincidentally, a new Catalyst Linux driver has now surfaced.
The Catalyst 15.5 driver is newer than the last official Linux driver releases -- Catalyst 14.12 Omega from last December. This Catalyst 15.5 Linux driver is marked in the fglrx 15.101 release stream, which pegs it newer than the 14.12 driver and just not some bug-fixes squeezed in, but it's older than the Catalyst driver unofficially released to Catalyst for Ubuntu 15.04. Found within Ubuntu 15.04 is a driver from the fglrx 15.20 series, which is the driver used for benchmarking this morning.
As soon as I have more information on this Catalyst 15.5 Linux driver update I'll certainly pass it along, but don't expect any miracles given it's still older than the Ubuntu Vivid driver. The download link is here but first needing to visit the AMD site due to it checking the HTTP referrer.
| 63
| 1,760,719,875.177328
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-5800-Farm-Addition
|
The Latest AMD APU Linux System Being Added To The Farm
|
Michael Larabel
|
Another AMD APU box is being added to the LinuxBenchmarking.com automated Linux performance test farm in the basement makeover server room.
As mentioned earlier this week in beginning to open up access to the massive collection of test data produced daily by this farm that's tracking the Linux kernel, GCC, and LLVM/Clang, it's still expanding. From the launch day earlier this week through 5 June -- the 11th Phoronix birthday -- all PayPal tips to Phoronix collected over this time are being used for adding more systems to this upstream performance tracking mission for tracking the performance of key Linux components over the long-haul and in looking out for regressions.
So far this week there's sadly been less than $100 USD collected for more systems, but at least with having some extra processors around and other components, I was already able to salvage another system.
This new system being added to the test farm is with an AMD A10-5800K "Trinity" APU and will run next to the Richland, Kaveri, and other APUs in our ~60 system farm. The A10-5800K retails for just over $90 but fortunately I had an extra A10-5800K laying around.
The motherboard I bought for the build was the ASRock FM2A58M-VG3+ R2.0. I bought this motherboard since it was micro ATX, FM2(+), and was one of the cheapest Trinity-supported motherboards available on Amazon. The board sells for just $42 and so far has been working out fine under Linux when loaded with a modern distribution, like Ubuntu 15.04, but most FM2 motherboards have been supporting Linux well for some time already.
The power supply used was the Corsair CS450M. This PSU sells for just under $60 but was lucky enough to get it at a time when there was a $30 mail-in-rebate. There's many Corsair power supplies in use within the test lab and they've all continued running strong.
8GB of Kingston HyperX Savage DDR3-2400MHz memory... Also bought on Amazon.com.
The case was this low-cost 2U enclosure I've bought several times now for this test farm.
This AMD APU system is running Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 and will be part of the daily SVN GCC benchmarking on LinuxBenchmarking.com. Look for those results to start appearing in the next day or two when the latest results from our Phoromatic server are pushed to the web server.
Once again, any and all tips to Phoronix through Friday will be used for adding more systems to this important automated performance test farm of open-source components. Please consider showing your appreciate for Phoronix over the past nearly eleven years, thank you!
| 4
| 1,760,719,875.851975
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-A10-7870K-Godavari-Linux
|
AMD Launches The A10-7870K "Godavari" APU
|
Michael Larabel
|
To no surprise, this morning AMD officially announced the AMD A10-7870K "Godavari" as the new high-end APU.
The A10-7870K is now the fastest-performing FM2+ APU and is selling for the sub-$140 price of the A10-7850K. The A10-7870K has four Steamroller cores at 3.9GHz with a 4.1GHz turbo frequency and a Radeon GCN GPU that has a 20% clock speed boost.
The A10-7870K is only a modest upgrade over the A10-7850K Kaveri but could make for a nice lower-end system. AMD is comparing the A10-7870K performance to Haswell Core i5 CPUs but at Core i3 pricing.
The A10-7870K should work fine under Linux given that there's no radical difference compared to the existing APU line-up. At the moment I don't have my hands on any A10-7870K but will be working to get my hands on one in the days ahead for Linux benchmarking.
| 18
| 1,760,719,876.993261
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-Tiger-Team
|
AMD Forms A Tiger Team For Catalyst Improvements, Including Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
I've found out from various people in the know that AMD has assembled a "tiger team" to tackle outstanding Catalyst driver issues. This tiger team isn't Linux specific, but Linux driver issues will be fully evaluated and tackled by this new group of driver specialists.
Instituted this year is a "tiger team" to provide elevated support for priority AMD customers. By definition, it's "a group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems." This tiger team will try to resolve pressing issues to the Catalyst driver on both Windows and Linux in a more timely manner and with better answers for customers.
Before getting too excited, this tiger team appears to be primarily focused on AMD enterprise customers leveraging the Catalyst driver, but not the casual Linux gamer or enthusiast. For any change there, as has been the case for years, you're best off just expressing to the various AIB board partner that in fact you buy their products and you're using them on Linux.
Hopefully this tiger team will lead to measurable improvements to the AMD Catalyst Linux driver, especially as there's serious problems with their binary driver in modern OGL4 workloads -- while game related, examples like the Metro Redux games, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and BioShock Infinite.
Unfortunately I don't have any further details to share right now on who's making up this AMD Catalyst tiger team, but if I happen to hear any more details, I'll pass it along on Phoronix. Here's to hoping for some more exciting Catalyst Linux driver updates in 2015 as so far it's been quite lackluster on the closed-source driver side.
| 56
| 1,760,719,878.565969
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDKFD-Pull-For-Linux-4.2
|
AMD's HSA Driver - AMDKFD - To See More Improvements In Linux 4.2
|
Michael Larabel
|
Besides Intel DRM updates landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel, AMD landed some changes to their HSA kernel driver named AMDKFD.
The AMDKFD pull that was pushed today into DRM-Next for Linux 4.2 includes new interrupts and events modules, a new kernel module parameter for controlling SIGTERM behavior when a memory exception ocurs inside the GPU kernel, improvements to the SDMA code, and other changes. The events support within the new AMDKFD code is part of the open-source HSA runtime stack for knowing when a dispatched job has been completed and is a prerequisite for upstreaming the HSA debugger support in the future.
More details on the latest AMDKFD HSA kernel driver changes for this next kernel cycle can be found via this Git commit to DRM-Next.
| 0
| 1,760,719,878.772982
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FP3-Lamar-Coreboot
|
AMD FP3 Motherboard Ported To Coreboot
|
Michael Larabel
|
Another AMD motherboard has been ported to work under Coreboot.
Sage Electronic Engineering, a company that does a lot of Coreboot work for AMD and other firms, has ported the AMD Lamar reference board for Coreboot. AMD Lamar is a consumer reference board used for AMD Kaveri APUs of the FP3 socket.
After previously adding the Family 15h Model 30 support to Coreboot, this Kaveri reference motherboard is now supported by Coreboot.
With Coreboot, Lamar is booting fine to DOS, Ubuntu 14.10, and Windows 7 according to Bruce Griffith of Sage Electronic Engineering. This new board port is just over 2,200 lines of code.
| 8
| 1,760,719,879.895654
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Open-Source-VCE-1.0
|
AMD Releases Open-Source VCE 1.0 Support
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD has gone back and managed to provide open-source Linux users with support for the VCE 1.0 video encode engine.
Last year AMD open-sourced their VCE video encode engine code for use by their open-source Linux graphics driver stack with the Radeon DRM kernel driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D and worked out a new OpenMAX state tracker. That open-source code drop only worked on the support for "VCE2" hardware found with the AMD GCN hardware and newer (Sea Islands, Kabini, etc). AMD's open-source Linux team has now gained permission for providing open-source VCE 1.0 support to offer video encode to older Radeon graphics processors.
Christian König at AMD has worked out VCE support for the 1.0 hardware, including Trinity and Richland APUs. Tahiti, Pitcairn, Verde, Oland, and Aruba are the hardware with VCE 1.0. This patch provides the kernel support though updated AMD GPU microcode is also needed.
This VCE 1.0 open-source enablement was done as part of a set of nine new VCE patches, including DPM support with VCE is now finally working for better power management.
These new AMD video encode patches should make it in for the Linux 4.2 kernel since it's already weeks too late for Linux 4.1.
| 28
| 1,760,719,879.959024
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/TearFree-X.Org-Radeon-Git
|
TearFree Option Lands In xf86-video-ati Git
|
Michael Larabel
|
As a quick follow-up to yesterday's article about a new TearFree option for the Radeon X.Org driver as the latest effort to eliminate tearing, that feature is now in Git.
For those wishing to try out the non-default TearFree option to try to reduce/eliminate tearing for non-rotated displays, you can now pull from the xf86-video-ati Git mainline. Michel Dänzer of AMD committed the fourth revision of the patch today for TearFree supportion.
This Radeon X.Org driver feature is documented via this Git commit.
| 21
| 1,760,719,881.482438
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDKFD-HSA-Improves-Int
|
AMDKFD HSA Linux Driver Improvements Land Today
|
Michael Larabel
|
For those not too busy discussing and digging through the new open-source AMDGPU kernel driver that was published yesterday, out today are some new patches for AMDKFD, the HSA Linux kernel driver.
As some material for eventual integration into the Linux 4.2 kernel, Oded Gabbay as the AMDKFD maintainer pushed out nine new patches so far today. The new patch series begins here.
Among the improvements with these new patches are an AMDKFD interrupt handling module, an events module and events IOCTL, memory exception handling, bad opcode exception handling, and after these improvements the AMDKFD kernel driver version was bumped to v0.7.2.
The Carrizo APUs coming out this summer will be the first fully HSA 1.0 compliant hardware when this AMDKFD driver stack should begin to shine along with AMD's open-source user-space HSA library.
| 2
| 1,760,719,881.495526
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Carrizo-PCI-IDs
|
AMD's New Carrizo Graphics PCI IDs
|
Michael Larabel
|
With yesterday's release of the new open-source "AMDGPU" Linux graphics driver stack we finally have a look at some of the hardware enablement code for the graphics processors of the upcoming "Carrizo" APUs.
The initial Carrizo PCI IDs for the graphics adapter are 0x9870, 0x9874, 0x9875, 0x9876, and 0x9877. There may end up being more models than that, but these are the IDs added as part of the initial bring-up. Not all of these IDs may end up being part of released products either as sometimes they allocate more PCI IDs than actually end up being used by released hardware.
The forthcoming Carrizo APUs use AMD's Excavator micro-architecture, will feature HSA 1.0 compliance, support DDR3/DDR4 memory, boast new graphics capabilities, and feature major improvements in power efficiency over existing AMD APUs. Latest reports are that AMD Carrizo APUs should be surfacing this summer.
We also see from the code that with the new hardware there's 4K video encode/decode rather than pre-Tonga hardware being limited to 1080p. There's also a new H.264 performance hardware decoder exposed for Tonga, among other improvements to RadeonSI Gallium3D and new features of the AMDGPU kernel driver. Also added to Radeon Gallium3D was the open-sourced Addrlib from Catalyst.
| 5
| 1,760,719,882.756573
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Open-Source-Addrlib
|
AMD Open-Sources "Addrlib" From Catalyst
|
Michael Larabel
|
As part of AMD finally releasing the AMDGPU kernel driver yesterday along with initial Iceland/Carrizo/Tonga support in Gallium3D, they also open-sourced a component formerly within the Catalyst proprietary driver.
At more than 22,373 lines of new code in Mesa for this newly-open-sourced component, it's quite big considering the Radeon Gallium3D driver is less than 100k lines of code. What AMD open-sourced is addrlib and it's a texture addressing and alignment calculator to be used by the Radeon Gallium3D driver.
Marek Olšák of AMD explained with the massive code drop in the patch, "This is an internal project that Catalyst uses and now open source will do too."
| 26
| 1,760,719,883.030661
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/No-Catalyst-15.4-Beta-Linux
|
There's Not Yet A Catalyst 15.4 Beta For Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
Windows users this week saw the release of an AMD Catalyst 15.4 Beta driver, but if you're looking out for the equivalent Linux build, sadly it has yet to surface.
In fact, if officially going by AMD.com Linux driver stable/beta releases, the last updates were last year. The last stable driver release is the Catalyst 14.12 "Omega" driver for Linux while the latest beta is Catalyst 14.6 Beta for Linux.
Ardent Phoronix readers will know though that AMD had provided Canonical with an early Catalyst 15.3 Beta Linux driver for Ubuntu 15.04 in order to support its new version of the Linux kernel and X.Org Server. This driver was since back-ported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
While this driver has been available exclusively on Ubuntu for a few weeks (though end-users/developers have since salvaged the packages to make this updated driver work on other distributions), this newer driver has yet to appear on AMD's web-site.
35-Way NVIDIA/AMD Proprietary Linux Graphics Driver Comparison / Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Linux With Open-Source Drivers
I've yet to hear from anyone at AMD when they plan to officially release a new Catalyst Linux driver regardless of it being in stable or beta form. All indications are that they're busy focusing on their new unified driver strategy that uses the common yet-to-be-released AMDGPU kernel driver.
The only downside of the new stack is that it basically tosses all current AMD Linux Catalyst users under the bus since this new AMDGPU open and closed-source driver stack is only for the Radeon R9 285 and future Rx 300 series graphics processors, but not the existing GPUs. For there, with an infrequently updated Catalyst Linux driver, the main choice is becoming the open-source R600/RadeonSI stack, which is still evolving for providing faster performance, suitable compute/OpenCL/HSA options, and slowly but surely gaining OpenGL 4.x functionality.
| 18
| 1,760,719,884.146744
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/R600g-SB-Geometry-Shaders
|
R600g SB Now Supports Geometry Shaders
|
Michael Larabel
|
For those running older Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D graphics driver, an important update landed in Mesa 10.6-devel Git this past week.
The R600g SB shader back-end that was developed by Vadim Girlin for delivering shader performance optimizations is now able to support OpenGL Geometry Shaders.
The work done by Glenn Kennard enables SB for geometry shaders within R600g. Adding this support took just a couple dozen lines of code with the SB GS support previously being disabled over not being able to handle CF_EMIT instructions. Details via this Git commit and the addition will be present in the upcoming Mesa 10.6 release.
| 12
| 1,760,719,884.470993
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-14.04-Catalyst-15.3
|
Catalyst 15.3 Beta Backported To Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
|
Michael Larabel
|
While AMD has yet to make the Catalyst 15.3 Beta Linux graphics driver available for download from their web-site, they released the driver to Canonical and as such this new AMD Linux driver has been available in Ubuntu 15.04 for a few weeks. Canonical is now back-porting this proprietary driver back into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr.
Since yesterday, the updated Catalyst 15.3 Beta (fglrx 15.20) has been sitting in "trusty-proposed" for ultimately landing in the Ubuntu Trusty archive as a stable update.
The Catalyst 15.3 driver adds support for the newer X.Org Server and Linux kernel releases plus various other changes. This is the first Catalyst Linux update since the 14.12 Omega driver release from last December.
Details on this big driver back-port to Ubuntu 14.04 can be found via the trusty-changes list.
| 3
| 1,760,719,885.411846
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-LLVM-Assembler-SI
|
AMD's GPU LLVM Backend Gains Support For Assembler & Inline Assembly
|
Michael Larabel
|
Tom Stellard of AMD has landed initial support into the AMD GPU LLVM back-end for the assembler and supporting inline assembly.
Stellard's commit explained, "This is currently considered experimental, but most of the more commonly used instructions should work. So far only SI has been extensively tested, CI and VI probably work too, but may be buggy. The current set of tests cases do not give complete coverage, but I think it is sufficient for an experimental assembler."
For the Southern Islands, Sea Islands, and Volcanic Islands, all DS / non-atomic MUBUF / SOP1 / SOP2 / SOPC instructions are supported by the assembler and some SMRD instructions. Those wanting to learn more about these instructions can see the Southern Islands ISA documentation.
This initial AMD GPU assembler support will be found in the LLVM 3.7 release.
| 20
| 1,760,719,886.084729
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blender-OpenCL-Cycles-Better
|
Improved OpenCL Support For Blender's Cycles Renderer
|
Michael Larabel
|
George Kyriazis of AMD has provided patches to the Blender project for vastly improving their OpenCL Cycles renderer support and allow for it to work with AMD GPUs.
Kyriazis wrote a Blender patch for splitting the Cycles' OpenCL mega-kernel into separate kernels. By breaking down the big compute kernel, better GPU utilization can be obtained and better performance. While George posted the patch, other AMD developers were also involved in redoing this OpenCL code for the Cycles renderer.
User benchmarks are showing huge improvements in the performance and also a slight reduction in CPU usage. While the work is still being reviewed, the patch can be viewed via developer.blender.org.
| 26
| 1,760,719,886.526853
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDKFD-Linux-4.1-Changes
|
AMDKFD Changes Queued For Linux 4.1 Kernel
|
Michael Larabel
|
Some Radeon DRM changes have already been queued for Linux 4.1 and now the AMDKFD HSA driver has its initial -next pull request for this next version of the Linux kernel.
The Linux 4.1 changes for the AMDKFD Heterogeneous System Architecture driver from AMD aren't too compelling, but most notable is the support for multiple graphics adapters to allow AMDKFD to work with multiple drivers/GPUs, such as for the existing Radeon DRM driver and the yet-to-be-published AMDGPU DRM driver.
Aside from supporting multiple KGD (Kernel Graphics Driver) instances, the other changes are relatively minor. You can see the initial AMDKFD Linux 4.1 changes via the drm-amdkfd-next pull request sent in by Oded Gabbay of AMD for landing into David Airlie's DRM-Next tree ahead of the opening of the 4.1 merge window once Linux 4.0 has been released.
| 0
| 1,760,719,887.624882
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-FreeSync-For-Linux
|
AMD FreeSync Support On Linux?
|
Michael Larabel
|
With this month's release of the Catalyst 15.3 Beta for Windows, FreeSync Technology support was added. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any Linux support is imminent.
Since AMD's FreeSync push this month and the supported Windows drivers now public, many Phoronix readers have been writing in to ask about Linux support for FreeSync... The open-source drivers aren't yet prepared to handle this technology and with AMD's Catalyst Linux blob it appears to be the same story.
FreeSync is AMD's competitor to NVIDIA G-Sync for allowing displays to have variable refresh rates by communicating with the APU/GPU for allowing a tear-free experience. FreeSync-supported monitors are able to precisely refresh at the rate that the graphics processor is rendering on a frame-by-frame basis in order to avoid tearing or stuttering. From the vendor-specific technologies then came VESA's Adaptive-Sync derived from FreeSync.
While I haven't yet been able to get any firm answers about AMD Linux plans for FreeSync, I'd hold off on any purchases for now on a compatible monitor just to exploit the functionality. On the GPU side, FreeSync is compatible with all current generation Radeon GPUs and AMD APUs. We're also still waiting for AMD to release the Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver to the Linux public -- up to now there's just a pre-seed of 15.3 Beta within the Ubuntu Vivid archive but no driver has yet been made available to the Linux masses via AMD.com.
| 58
| 1,760,719,887.930837
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-KFD-HSA-Multiple-KGD
|
Support For Multiple Graphics Drivers With AMDKFD Kernel Driver
|
Michael Larabel
|
A patch published on Sunday for the new AMDKFD HSA kernel driver adds support for using more than one graphics card/driver.
The new patch by Oded Gabbay and Xihan Zhang, two of the AMD HSA Linux developers, adds support for handling multiple KGD (Kernel Graphics Driver) instances. With the current AMDKFD HSA kernel driver up through Linux 4.0, there's only support for one graphics driver instance.
Using this new less than 100 line kernel patch, the AMDKFD DRM HSA driver can now support multiple KGD instances whether they be two AMDGPU instances (the new R9 285, Carrizo, and Rx 300 series GPU driver), two Radeon DRM drivers (for supporting all current Radeon hardware), or a combination of AMDGPU and Radeon hardware.
This new patch for supporting multiple kernel graphics drivers only impacts this HSA driver and has nothing to do with CrossFire/OpenGL or other long sought after multi-GPU features. The patch can currently be found on dri-devel and will hopefully be merged for the Linux 4.1 kernel.
| 16
| 1,760,719,889.074117
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Two-More-Open-Linux-Devs
|
AMD Is Hiring Two More Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developers
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD issued two job postings this past week for hiring more open-source Linux graphics driver developers.
AMD is looking to hire two senior software development engineers to work on open-source graphics drivers in Markham, Ontario. The two new hires will work on the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack and enable new hardware support, improve driver performance, doordinate with developers and Linux distributions, address customer/QA issues, and take care of other driver-related work.
These two software engineering positions require experienced Linux developers ideally with existing open-source graphics driver programming experience, experience with multimedia is a plus, and other Linux talents are a plus.
The two new postings last week are Req 31264 and Req 31265 with all of the same details.
These developers would be joining the team of existing open-source Linux Radeon driver developers including Alex Deucher, Marek Olšák, Christian König, Michel Dänzer, etc.
It's great to see AMD hiring more to work on their open-source Linux graphics stack given that Intel has multiple times more open-source developers employed working on their graphics driver. Hopefully this will lead to more OpenGL 4.x support getting squared away, Vulkan support, and other features that lead to the open-source driver trailing behind the Catalyst blob.
| 88
| 1,760,719,889.082936
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-15.04-15.3-Beta
|
Ubuntu 15.04 Receives Early Release Of Catalyst 15.3 Linux Driver
|
Michael Larabel
|
Early adopters of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet can now use AMD's new Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver that's been packaged for Ubuntu and uploaded to the Vivid repository prior to its release on AMD.com.
As usual, AMD has pre-seeded Canonical with a beta of the next Catalyst Linux driver release. This driver is needed to support the latest Linux kernel and X.Org Server of Ubuntu 15.04 with the public AMD.com driver not supporting these latest versions. This has been happening for years with AMD's turnaround time for new xorg-server and Linux kernel support generally lagging.
Known changes for the Catalyst 15.3 Beta include support for X.Org Server ABI 19 (X.Org Server 1.17) and dropping of various DKMS patches. This driver is significantly larger than Catalyst 14.12, the current stable release, but it's not known yet what other changes are encompassed by this new driver.
It was just a few days ago I wrote about expecting a new Catalyst Linux update soon. It's not known though when AMD will release Catalyst 14.3 Beta for Linux to the general (non-Ubuntu) public. Confirmation of the package hitting vivid-proposed was sent today to the vivid-changes list.
| 25
| 1,760,719,890.228478
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Zen-CPU-Znver1
|
AMD Starts Linux Enablement On Next-Gen "Zen" Architecture
|
Michael Larabel
|
While we're still waiting for AMD to release their new GPU kernel driver for supporting the existing R9 285 "Tonga" graphics card and their next-gen graphics cards coming out later this year, on the CPU side the AMD Linux developers have already started shipping patches to support their next-gen CPU architecture not expected for release until 2016~2017. Tux, meet the AMD Zen architecture.
AMD Zen is the codename for AMD's new architecture that's a fresh design from the ground-up and the successor to AMD Excavator architecture. Zen is reportedly the x86_64 sister core architecture to go along with the 64-bit ARMv8-A K12 architecture.
Last week AMD published a "add znver1 processor" patch to the GNU Binutils package. This patch doesn't mention Zen explicitly but "znver1" is short for Zen after their long run of bdverX codenames within Binutils, GCC, etc, for indicating the Bulldozer architecture.
This patch reveals the AMD Zen design no longer supports TBM, FMA4, XOP, or LWP ISAs. Meanwhile the new ISA additions are for SMAP, RDSEED, SHA, XSAVEC, XSAVES, CLFLUSHOPT, and ADCX: ISAs are supported. It's nice to see with Zen that AMD will support the RDSEED instruction, which Intel has added since Broadwell for seeding another pseudorandom number generator. SMAP is short for the Supervisor Mode Access Prevention and is another Intel instruction set extension already supported by Linux.
AMD Zen also adds a new CLZERO instruction. This is a new one and "clzero instruction zero's out the 64 byte cache line specified in rax. Bits 5:0 of rAX are ignored."
The AMD zenver1 patch for Binutils was posted last week by an AMD developer to the binutils mailing list. Expect more AMD Zen patches for GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, the Linux kernel, etc, in the months ahead.
| 101
| 1,760,719,890.669238
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Catalyst-Linux-March-2015
|
AMD Will Release New Catalyst Linux Driver Update This Month
|
Michael Larabel
|
It looks like in the next two weeks AMD will finally be releasing an updated Catalyst/fglrx graphics driver for Linux users.
Back in early December was the big Catalyst 14.12 driver update for Linux and Windows users. However, since then, there's been no new Linux graphics driver updates whether it be in beta or stable shape. This three months without an updated Catalyst Linux graphics driver hasn't stopped new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases that go unsupported by Catalyst. There's also been numerous new Linux games released over the past quarter that have outstanding bugs against the Catalyst Linux driver.
This three months without a Catalyst Linux driver update is also during the period we're waiting for AMD's new Linux driver architecture. AMD is still working on their new driver design of a common, open-source new AMD DRM Linux kernel driver that's used by the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space as well as their binary-only Catalyst user-space. AMD has yet to release this new "AMDGPU" kernel driver (not to be confused with the AMDGPU LLVM driver of the same name) though the initial code has been expected for release this winter.
Several Phoronix readers have been commenting in the forums that they've been hearing that there will be a new Catalyst Linux driver update in March and I've too now been able to confirm this information. There is a new AMD Catalyst Linux driver update nearby, but what's not known yet is whether it will incorporate any of the new Linux driver design or just be a bug-fix release over Catalyst 14.12. Given that the new AMD GPU DRM kernel driver has yet to be published on any of the developer lists for undergoing a technical review by other upstream developers, I'd say it'd be too early to see a Catalyst driver shipping the new kernel driver out-of-tree in DKMS form. Thus right now I'm more inclined to guess it will be another bug-fix/minor-feature release over Catalyst 14.12, but we'll see soon enough.
Share your hopes or suspicions about the next Catalyst Linux driver update in our forums by commenting on this article.
| 214
| 1,760,719,891.221829
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MediaTek-AMD-SoC-Graphics
|
MediaTek Said To Be Licensing AMD Graphics Technology
|
Michael Larabel
|
Taiwanese SoC manufacturer MediaTek is said to be licensing AMD graphics technology for use in future high-end ARM SoC designs.
Talk from Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona is that AMD and MediaTek have teamed up to work on mobile SoC graphics. Ultra low-power AMD graphics in a MediaTek SoC would presumably give them a hefty advantage over the other high-end SoCs out there just licensing ARM Mali or Imagination PowerVR tech and could better deliver Qualcomm Adreno -- which in turn are far-derived by AMD/ATI via Qualcomm's Imageon acquisition over a half-decade ago -- and NVIDIA Tegra class graphics.
Besides delivering faster graphics, this move would help out MediaTek with their HSA/GPGPU offerings too as MediaTek is one of the founding members alongside AMD on the HSA Foundation.
Assuming everything pans out, it will be interesting to see what happens from a driver perspective whether MediaTek would make use at all of the open-source Linux graphics stack with the Radeon Gallium3D driver working on Android or if they'd go for Catalyst or some other route.
AMD nor MediaTek has officially announced any partnership or licensing agreement, but you can read a bit more about the Mobile World Congress chatter on this topic via our friends at Fudzilla.
| 29
| 1,760,719,892.265004
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-VR-LiquidVR-Tech
|
AMD Gets Into VR With LiquidVR Technology
|
Michael Larabel
|
Another interesting announcement at GDC2015 yesterday besides the new Vulkan API, the Source 2 Engine, Unity 5, and more was AMD's LiquidVR announcement.
LiquidVR is AMD's foray into VR but it's not a product. LiquidVR is an initiative by AMD to make VR "as comfortable and realistic as possible by creating and maintaining what’s known as 'presence' -- a state of immersive awareness where situations, objects, or characters within the virtual world seem 'real.' Guided by close collaboration with key technology partners in the ecosystem, LiquidVR uses AMD’s GPU software and hardware sub-systems to tackle the common issues and pitfalls of achieving presence, such as reducing motion-to-photon latency to less than 10 milliseconds. This is a crucial step in addressing the common discomforts, such as motion sickness, that may occur when you turn your head in a virtual world and it takes even a few milliseconds too long for a new perspective to be shown."
AMD LiquidVR is designed to be compatible with a broad range of VR devices and in the end they hope this technology will allow them to sell more GPUs to gamers. More details via this AMD.com page.
| 12
| 1,760,719,892.816116
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Mantle-Docs-Coming
|
AMD Will Release Mantle Programming Guide, API Reference This Month
|
Michael Larabel
|
This month AMD is planning to finally make their Mantle graphics API more "open" by releasing a 450-page programming guide and API reference for Mantle.
This first major public documentation drop for the AMD Mantle API is said to be coming this month, though it wouldn't be a surprise if they already release it later this week at GDC2015.
AMD's announcement about the future of Mantle also acknowledges the era of DirectX 12 and Next-Generation OpenGL (what we now know is the Vulkan Graphics API. AMD is helping to develop both APIs and as their partners shift their focus towards these newer APIs, AMD says 2015 will be a transitional year for Mantle while still continuing to support Mantle for their trusted partners planning to continue using Mantle for future projects. AMD also says Mantle's definition of "open" will widen this year. Mantle isn't being killed off but will be "a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs."
More details via this AMD Gaming blog post by Raja Koduri while all of the really exciting details will come later this week at GDC.
| 47
| 1,760,719,894.053855
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Carrizo-More-Details
|
AMD Talks Up The Carrizo APU At ISSCC
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD has released more details on their forthcoming "Carrizo" APUs from the IEEE International Solid-State CIrcuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.
The Carrizo hardware won't be in the hands of the public for months but AMD talked up the Carrizo APU with it featuring "Excavator" CPU cores, GCN graphics, and the Fusion Control Hub (FCH / Southbridge) all on the same chip. Carrizo is going to be the first true HSA component.
While Carrizo is being spun at a 28nm process, AMD believes they've juiced out big power efficiency gains and they've squeezed in 3.1 billion transistors with the same die size. The expectations set by AMD is that the new APUs will have around 20% better performance and 5% better IPC performance while consuming 40% less power than Kaveri.
Carrizo will support Mantle, DirectX 12, and glNext as far as the new graphics support. There will also be H.265 support with the R-Series graphics but there's no word (sadly) on VP9. Carrizo will also still integrate AMD TrustZone technology for better system security.
When it comes to the Linux support for Carrizo, work is underway. GCC and LLVM/Clang already handle Excavator / Bdver4 tuning for optimizing generated binaries against the new AMD processor cores, there's already a thermal driver, and the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver has been prepping for Carrizo. The big piece of the open-source puzzle still missing is the new AMD GPU kernel driver that will not only be needed for the open-source graphics support but also the new Catalyst driver. We're still waiting to see this new AMD kernel driver but have not received any further updates when it will be released for supporting the R9 285 Tonga, Carrizo, and other future AMD graphics products.
As always, stay tuned to Phoronix for the latest Linux hardware news, benchmarks, and graphics driver information.
| 44
| 1,760,719,894.098147
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Hawaii-Linux-3.20-Reclockin
|
AMD R9 290 Hawaii Users Will Have An Important Fix With Linux 3.20
|
Michael Larabel
|
Beyond the big set of AMD Radeon changes for Linux 3.20, Alex Deucher of AMD mailed in some important Radeon DRM driver fixes today that are a big deal for some R9 290 "Hawaii" users of the open-source driver.
Alex's Radeon drm-next-3.20 pull request today has a fix for embedded DisplayPort for bridge chips, but the other change is fixing the voltage setup on Hawaii. The fixed voltaged setup on Hawaii is for properly fetching the real voltage values from AtomBIOS to fix problems with dynamic clocking on certain R9 290/290X graphics cards.
The Hawaii voltage fix is related to this FreeDesktop.org bug with some graphics cards not properly re-clocking. The pull request with these two fixes can be found on the dri-devel list.
| 20
| 1,760,719,895.207349
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Mesa-Pinned-Memory
|
GL_AMD_pinned_memory Lands In Mesa
|
Michael Larabel
|
Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side.
Earlier this month I wrote about GL_AMD_pinned_memory Comes To The Open-Source Radeon Driver with patches written by AMD's Marek Olšák. As of today in Mesa Git master all of that work is in place to expose the AMD_pinned_memory extension, user pointer support, etc.
From the OpenGL.org registry, "This extension defines an interface that allows improved control of the physical memory used by the graphics device. It allows an existing page of system memory allocated by the application to be used as memory directly accessible to the graphics processor. One example application of this functionality would be to be able to avoid an explicit synchronous copy with sub-system of the application; for instance it is possible to directly draw from a system memory copy of a video image."
This feature will be part of the Mesa 10.6 release in about three months.
| 9
| 1,760,719,895.517895
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Interstellar-Marines-Catalyst
|
Interstellar Marines On Linux With Catalyst: Bull S*#@
|
Michael Larabel
|
Interstellar Marines is a science fiction FPS game in development that's powered by the Unity 4 Game Engine. While it's been available in early access mode for Linux gamers going back several months, the latest AMD Catalyst driver still seems to be having issues with this game.
Interstellar Marines hit Steam Greenlight in 2012 and was insired by Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Half-Life, and other games. The game is developed by Zero Point Software. Early access to Interestellar Marines is available via Steam for $18.99 USD on Windows, OS X, and Linux/SteamOS.
While this game has been available for Linux for a while, I haven't tested it out myself for the lack of it not suiting my automated benchmarking requirements. However, Phoronix reader "calexil" wrote into Phoronix to share a YouTube video he made showing off the game with the Catalyst 14.12 "OMEGA" Linux graphics driver.
He forewarns that there's explicit language in his video due to being upset over the poor graphics performance of Catalyst 14.12 when using a Radeon R9 270 graphics card for this Unity 4 game. The rest of his system comes down to an AMD FX-8350 Vishera, 8GB of RAM, Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint 17.1, and is playing at 1920 x 1080. His Radeon R9 270 graphics card is from XFX. The specs should be good enough for this independent Unity-powered game, but at least with Catalyst 14.12, there's still issues to overcome.
Hopefully a future Catalyst Linux update will improve the experience... Though I'm not entirely surprised by the Interstellar Marines results given that with Catalyst 14.12 I've ran into issues with Unreal Engine 4 along with the Metro Redux games on Linux and Civilization Beyond Earth on Linux.
If you've tried out Interstellar Marines, comment on this article to let us know what driver/GPU you're using and how it worked out for you on Linux.
| 64
| 1,760,719,896.568148
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDKFD-HSA-Carrizo-APUs-Linux
|
AMDKFD Driver Does More Prepping For Carrizo / VI APUs
|
Michael Larabel
|
Earlier this month I wrote about AMD preparing open-source HSA support for Carrizo APUs that aren't launching until later this year. Today more patches were published for the AMDKFD kernel driver in preparing for the forthcoming Volcanic Islands APUs.
As explained in the earlier article, Volcanic Islands is the codename for the AMD GCN 1.2 architecture that provides a more efficient ISA, video scaler improvements, a new multimedia decode/encode engine, improved performance, and other optimizations. The Volcanic Islands will come to AMD's APUs with the forthcoming "Carrizo" products. Carrizo will feature the latest GCN graphics while featuring "Excavator" CPU cores, DDR3/DDR4 memory support, and other new features. On the desktop side, the R9 285 Tonga is the first VI GPU.
Prototype Carrizo systems were shown last week at CES in Las Vegas, but the launch isn't expected still for some months. However, due to the kernel development cycle, kernel patches are already coming out to ensure they'll be mainlined in time given AMD's unified Linux driver focus and thus needing to get mainline support for new hardware ASAP.
Oded Gabbay at AMD who has been spearheading the AMDKFD driver work sent four new patches today in preparing the HSA support for the new APUs. "This patch-set continues to prepare amdkfd so it could support VI APU. it prepares DQM [Device Queue Manager] and KQ [Kernel Queue] modules to support more than one ASIC." More work beyond the new patches and the older work is still needed for getting Volcanic Islands fully supported.
On a slightly unrelated note, for those wondering about the name of this new AMDKFD kernel driver, John Bridgman explained it as "KFD is short for Kernel FSA Driver. What we call HSA today used to be called FSA (Fusion System Architecture), but was renamed to make it less AMD-specific as part of ramping up a cross-vendor consortium. There was an internal discussion along the lines of 'we need a term for AMD's HSA implementation so let's use keep FSA for the AMD implementation.' Since the kernel driver was vendor-specific we kept the KFD name rather than renaming it to KHD (and KHD rolls even less smoothly off the tongue than KFD)."
Aside from AMDKFD work for Carrizo, there's already been enablement/optimization work within the open-source compilers for Bdver4 and thermal monitoring code, among other work. One of the big items we're still waiting on though is the premiere of the new AMDGPU DRM driver that will replace the Radeon DRM driver for the Radeon R9 285 and all future AMD graphics processors.
| 3
| 1,760,719,897.244287
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Tosses-Three-Execs
|
AMD Loses Three More Executives
|
Michael Larabel
|
It seems the corporate restructuring at AMD isn't yet over with the post-CES announcement yesterday of three more top-level executives leaving the company.
The biggest name losing the company is John Byrne, AMD's general manager of their Computing & Graphics Business, who previous to that worked as the AMD Chief Sales Officer.
The two others out of AMD now are Colette LaForce, AMD's Chief Marketing Officer, and Raj Naik, AMD's Chief Strategy Officer.
AMD didn't explicitly say these executives were canned but rather the standard line of leaving the company for other opportunities. This isn't too surprising given AMD's past shake-ups and in October AMD getting a new CEO along with laying off more employees.
Next week we'll hear how their Q4 results and hopefully about their plans for a better 2015.
| 22
| 1,760,719,897.845478
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg4NTA
|
AMDKFD HSA Kernel Driver Changes Planned For Linux 3.20
|
Michael Larabel
|
Oded Gabbay of AMD has sent in his latest AMDKFD kernel driver changes that he's hoping to have integrated for the Linux 3.20 kernel merge window.
The AMDKFD driver is the kernel portion to AMD's open-source Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) kernel stack (along with the Radeon and soon-to-be-released AMDGPU kernel DRM drivers). Then on the user-space side is a new open-source HSA library and the Radeon Gallium3D drivers and Clover state tracker.
After being initially merged for Linux 3.19, the AMDKFD changes queued for Linux 3.20 right now include:
- Add support for SDMA usermode queues.
- Replace logic of sub-allocating from GART buffer in amdkfd. Instead of using radeon_sa module, use a new module that is more suited for this purpose.
- Add the number of watch points to amdkfd topology.
- Split a function that did two things into two separate functions. This recent AMDKFD work is outlined as part of this pull request into DRM-Next. Missing from this latest batch is the initial work for Volcanic Islands / Carrizo APU support. It's also still not clear at this point if the new AMDGPU driver with R9 285 Tonga support will premiere in time for merging into Linux 3.20.
| 8
| 1,760,719,898.992193
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg4MzU
|
AMDKFD Linux Driver Begins Preparing For VI Carrizo APUs
|
Michael Larabel
|
Patches published by AMD today prepare the AMDKFD Linux kernel HSA driver for initial support of forthcoming AMD "VI" APUs.
Volcanic Islands is the codename for the AMD GCN 1.2 architecture that's currently in use by just the Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" graphics card. GCN 1.2 provides a more efficient ISA, video scaler improvements, a new multimedia decode/encode engine, improved performance, and other optimizations.
The Volcanic Islands will come to AMD's APUs with the forthcoming "Carrizo" products. Carrizo will feature the latest GCN graphics while featuring "Excavator" CPU cores, DDR3/DDR4 memory support, and other new features. Carrizo will premiere later in 2015. Prototypes of Carrizo hardware are being shown off this week at CES in Las Vegas.
The open-source AMDKFD patches published today prepare the initial VI APU support ahead of Carrizo's launch. There aren't any new graphics support patches for these APUs as the new hardware will be handled by the yet-to-be-published AMDGPU kernel driver rather than the existing Radeon DRM driver. The new AMDKFD driver patches prepare for using the AMDGPU driver and make other changes in readying for Volcanic Islands.
The new AMDKFD driver patches can be found via the dri-devel list and will presumably be ready for merging into the Linux 3.20 kernel. Hopefully soon we'll see the new AMDGPU kernel driver finally surface -- right now the lack of the next-gen AMD open-source code is blocking open-source support for the Radeon R9 285.
| 22
| 1,760,719,899.345572
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg1OTE
|
AMDKFD -- AMD HSA On Linux -- Will Not Support 32-Bit Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
This really shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but AMD won't support HSA on 32-bit Linux.
Given that all of AMD's processors of the last several years have supported x86_64, software in general is beginning to focus on 64-bit only, and that within their binary drivers for matters like OpenCL 2.0 is 64-bit Linux only, the open-source HSA stack is being limited to 64-bit Linux.
The new AMDKFD driver needed for open-source HSA on Linux is being introduced with the Linux 3.19 kernel. In a later commit, support is being explicitly disabled for 32-bit user processes. This was done due to an internal AMD decision to remove support for 32-bit user processes on Linux for its Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) stack.
If you are running a modern AMD APU on Linux, you really should be running the 64-bit Linux version of your preferred distribution.
| 25
| 1,760,719,900.551481
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg3OTg
|
Many More AMD FreeSync Monitors Are On The Way
|
Michael Larabel
|
A number of new monitors that support AMD FreeSync are being shown off this week at CES. FreeSync is AMD's method of matching the monitor's variable refresh rate to that of the graphics card that is similar to the now VESA-approved DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync.
LG, BenQ, Samsung, and ViewSonic are among the major players that have already been confirmed for showing off new FreeSync-enabled displays this week at CES in Las Vegas. The new FreeSync displays from AMD's partners support refresh rates between 30 and 144Hz with resolutions of 1080p to Ultra HD / 4K.
One of the nicest FreeSync monitors shown off thus far is the LG 34UM67 that is a 34-inch 21:9 ultra-wide display running at 3440 x 1440, per the PR from last week.
Stay tuned for more FreeSync news and other exciting hardware announcements from CES this week in Vegas.
| 41
| 1,760,719,900.559625
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg1NzU
|
AMD Catalyst 14.12 Linux Driver Released -- Huge Update!
|
Michael Larabel
|
As said last week that a huge new Catalyst Linux driver release would be coming on Tuesday and sure enough it has arrived. Catalyst 14.12 is the biggest AMD proprietary Linux graphics driver update in quite some time.
Today's Catalyst 14.12 for Linux delivers OpenCL 2.0 support, VA-API video decoding with H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 format support, and distribution-specific packages offered at AMD.com for Ubuntu and Red Hat. There's also many bug fixes, support for modern kernel versions / xorg-server, potential performance improvements, and a range of other work.
Download the Catalyst "Omega" Linux driver at AMD.com. Stay tuned for benchmarks on Phoronix.
| 109
| 1,760,719,901.755466
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg1NTE
|
Major AMD Catalyst Linux Update Expected Next Week
|
Michael Larabel
|
Due out next week is a very significant update to AMD's Catalyst Linux graphics driver as they continue to work towards the unified AMD Linux driver strategy.
There hasn't been an AMD Catalyst Linux update in more than two months but it looks like the update due out next week will be worth the wait. This next AMD Catalyst Linux update due out on Tuesday, 9 December, will bring VA-API video decoding support (finally an alternative to using the ill-adopted, AMD-specific XvBA API), OpenGL ES 3.0 support, OpenCL 2.0, AMD FreeSync support on Linux, OpenMP 3.1 over HSA, and Linux packaging improvements. There's also 5K x 3K display support, frame pacing for Dual Graphics, and other enhancements for both the Windows and Linux graphics drivers. At least under Windows, there's very significant performance optimizations due out too.
This driver will presumably be marked in the fglrx 14.50 series after talking about it in September and finally now materializing.
Stay tuned for more coverage and Linux graphics benchmarks next week. Next week's driver though is not expected to utilize or depend upon the forthcoming "AMDGPU" kernel driver that has yet to be published.
| 68
| 1,760,719,902.53893
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg1MzE
|
AMDKFD Is Present For Linux 3.19 In Open-Source HSA Start
|
Michael Larabel
|
The AMDKFD driver, which has been under development in the public spotlight for the past few months as a necessary piece to having AMD HSA open-source support on Linux, will premiere with the Linux 3.19 kernel.
The AMDKFD driver has been merged into DRM-Next for landing into the Linux 3.19 merge window with the various open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver updates. (The pulling of AMDKFD driver actually happened last week, but for whatever reason my IP ended up being blocked from the FreeDesktop.org Git server so only regained access yesterday and have been catching up with the Git changes across the various interesting repositories.)
If you're not familiar with the AMDKFD driver or AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture, read this original article.
The AMDKFD driver can be used in conjunction with AMD's open-source graphics stack (Gallium3D + AMD GPU LLVM back-end) and the recently open-sourced HSA runtime library as an initial HSA Linux implementation along with the Clover state tracker for OpenCL compute. It's ready for use and can be tested with AMD Kaveri APU hardware.
While open-source HSA is great and AMD's continued open-source OpenCL work, not found in Linux 3.19 is AMD's yet-to-be-released new DRM kernel driver that last I heard was still expected to begin making it out in patch form this year but would not be mainlined until at least Linux 3.20. It's too bad as meanwhile AMD's latest official closed-source Catalyst Linux binary driver is from September.
| 14
| 1,760,719,903.344356
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTg0MDE
|
AMD's "AMDKFD" HSA Driver Is Ready For Pulling In Linux 3.19
|
Michael Larabel
|
While the new "AMDGPU" kernel driver won't be merged until at least Linux 3.20, it looks like the AMDKFD driver could be merged for the upcoming Linux 3.19 kernel.
Oded Gabbay of AMD sent out the pull request to David Airlie for trying to land the AMDKFD driver in Linux 3.19. The difference between this driver and AMDGPU is that it's already been public for a while where we're still waiting for the AMDGPU graphics driver to be published that's the new DRM driver to be shared with the Catalyst Linux user-space for supporting the AMD Radeon R9 285 and newer GPUs.
While the AMDKFD driver hasn't yet been pulled by Airlie at the time of writing, this driver has already undergone review from upstream developers and in fact revised six times through the public process. Given that the drm-next merge window is still open for a few more days, this driver stands good chances of being merged then as a new Linux 3.19 driver. Friday's sixth version contains just minor changes to the driver compared to last week.
With the AMDKFD driver for Kaveri APUs and newer, when paired with the user-space HSA support you get a very nice, open-source working HSA compute stack that can execute OpenCL kernels.
The AMDKFD pull request can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list.
| 2
| 1,760,719,904.105176
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgzODY
|
AMD's HSA Run-Time Library Is Now Open-Source
|
Michael Larabel
|
Last week we reported on AMD's plans for a complete user-space open-source HSA stack. Today they have finally delivered!
The last remaining component,. the HSA run-time library was open-sourced this afternoon on GitHub. This HSA library goes with the AMD GPU LLVM back-end to form a complete user-space open-source driver stack for HSA applications using kernels written using OpenCL C99. This code goes along with AMD's new "AMDKFD" kernel HSA driver that's still in the process of being mainlined. The AMDKFD driver could potentially appear in the Linux 3.19 kernel but probably won't be merged before Linux 3.20 if going through the DRM subsystem pull.
AMD also open-sourced a basic matric multiplication OpenCL application ported to HSA for demonstrating their compiler stack that will work on AMD Kaveri hardware.
More details can be found in the just-posted kernel development list announcement that HSA RT is now Open Source. The HSA runtime library source code can be found on GitHub.
| 41
| 1,760,719,904.540627
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgzODQ
|
AMD Gallium3D Marks Huge Win: Beating Catalyst In Steam On Linux Game
|
Michael Larabel
|
As a follow up to yesterday's 16-way AMD GPU comparison with the latest open-source Linux graphics drivers, here's some numbers with the same graphics cards when adding in the Catalyst Linux graphics driver... The numbers may very well surprise you.
These results are just a preview to the full-on results that will likely be shared on Friday along with more information, etc. Here's a teaser:
Yep, that's Team Fortress 2 where the latest Radeon Gallium3D stack is largely leading over the Catalyst Linux driver... With some of the AMD graphics processors, the open-source Linux driver takes a nice lead over Catalyst.
But before getting too excited, the Radeon Gallium3D driver isn't across the board faster in all OpenGL Linux games...
With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Catalyst was largely faster -- especially for the newer GCN graphics cards -- but with some of the older Radeon results the numbers are quite close.
Again, stay tuned for my full findings in an article on Phoronix likely coming tomorrow. If you appreciate all of the (generally exclusive) Linux hardware testing and Linux hardware reviews done at Phoronix, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Besides those methods of support, I rely on advertisements to allow Phoronix.com to continue to operate, so please respect them; carrying out these tests are very time consuming, not to mention the associated energy and hardware costs.
| 48
| 1,760,719,905.488834
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgzNTQ
|
LLVM 3.5.1 Planned For December Debut
|
Michael Larabel
|
It looks like the first point release to LLVM 3.5 will be out in December.
LLVM 3.5 was released in September and now AMD's Tom Stellard as the stable release manager is making plans to release 3.5.1 in early December. Stellard is planning to have new stable patches merged until 26 November when a 3.5.1 Release Candidate 1 will be issued. After RC1, only regression fixes to LLVM 3.5.0 will be accepted. If all goes as planned, the official LLVM 3.5.1 release would come on 3 December.
Stellard announced the LLVM 3.5.1 planning today on the LLVM mailing list. Meanwhile for LLVM 3.6 that will likely come in H1'2015.
| 0
| 1,760,719,905.681294
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgzMzc
|
AMD Is Prepared To Release A Complete User-Space Open-Source Stack For HSA
|
Michael Larabel
|
In the coming days AMD will be releasing AMD's HSA run-time library as open-source!
Published on Saturday was the fifth version of the AMDKFD kernel driver that's key to AMD's open-source HSA plans. This newest version adds support for HSA Architected Queue Language (AQL) packets, a new get version ioctl, and various fixes.
Oded Gabbay of AMD began the AMDKFD v5 series by saying, "This version is released several days ahead of the release of AMD's HSA Runtime library as Open Source. Coupled with the modification that Thomas Stellard did for the r600 LLVM back-end, AMD will be effectively releasing a _complete_ userspace Open Source stack/solution for running HSA applications using kernels written in OpenCL C99 on top of amdkfd." It's news that in the coming days the AMD HSA run-time library will be open-sourced.
However, this news doesn't come as a huge surprise. AMD representatives have said in our forums for a while that open-source HSA should come together by the end of the year. Last month was when they added native object code support as another big step forward. Now it looks like the HSA kernel driver is getting into shape and with the imminent runtime library release, the user-space side is getting squared away.
More is to come next week and about the flow of things and a demo application, Gabbay wrote:
The method for building & running kernel programs involves offline compilation of a .cl source file, using clang plus a version of the r600 LLVM back end which Tom has modified so that a HW ISA binary file is generated. That binary file will then be imported into the HSAIL RT using the hsa_code_unit_load() API function in the HSA RT, and can then be used in compute operations initiated via calls to the HSAIL RT API and writes to userspace queues.
The HSA RT communicates with the amdkfd through the libhsakmt userspace library (equivalent of libdrm). That library is already open sourced.
AMD will supply a fully working application (port of the MatrixMultiplication application), both .cl file and .c file. The .cl file can be compiled with the above mentioned method and the application will load it and submit it through the HSA RT queues. This application is already ready and I am waiting for an IP approval to release it. I expect it to be released next week. Once that happens, I will publish the link to download the application's source code and instructions on how to run it.The open-source HSA library code should be out next week pending IP review so stay tuned for more information then, until then checkout the AMDKFD v5 patch series. What a great birthday present!
| 27
| 1,760,719,907.186728
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgzMzg
|
R600g Driver Patched For OpenGL 4.0 Indirect Draw Support
|
Michael Larabel
|
The R600g Gallium3D driver has new patches available -- along with a needed kernel patch -- for supporting OpenGL 4.0's GL_ARB_draw_indirect extension.
The OpenGL 4.0 GL_ARB_draw_indirect extension is already supported by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer (along with Intel's driver, Nouveau NVC0, LLVMpipe, and Softpipe) while now it's coming to R600g. Besides needing a patched R600g driver for GL_ARB_draw_indirect support, there's a related kernel patch that has yet to be applied and thus won't land until at least the Linux 3.19 kernel. Assuming you have a patched software stack, you need a Radeon HD 5000 series or newer GPU to benefit from this OpenGL 4.0 extension.
There's the Mesa patch and a kernel patch for the Radeon DRM code. These patches were posted on Saturday by Glenn Kennard. Those unfamiliar with the GL_ARB_draw_indirect extension can find it documented at OpenGL.org. Given that there's kernel changes needed that won't land until at least the next cycle (Linux 3.19), the R600g support likely won't be merged ahead of the Mesa 10.4 branching that's set to take place next week.
| 3
| 1,760,719,907.270716
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgyNDc
|
AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Enables VDPAU Again
|
Michael Larabel
|
For those stuck running on the R300g driver, which supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series and older GPUs, you really should consider upgrading your graphics card and likely your system. But if you're set on using the R300g driver going into the foreseeable future, you might as well upgrade Mesa.
While the R300 Gallium3D driver seldom sees new commit activity to mainline Mesa, as of today the VDPAU state tracker support was re-enabled for the R300g driver for its very basic video playback support.
There was also a small fix to R300g that landed with the re-enabling of R300g VDPAU support.
Beyond today's R300g changes and two other minor commitd last week, the last R300g driver activity was in September with a total of three commits, and then a few more commits over the summer but for all intents and purposes the R300g driver development is largely over.
| 15
| 1,760,719,908.588679
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgxNzE
|
AMD Is Restructuring Again, Losing 7% Of Employees
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD reported their Q3'2014 results yesterday and they weren't good for the company. AMD will be restructuring again and will be slashing their global headcount by about 7%.
AMD's Computing and Graphics segments were doing poor in the third quarter with AMD's overall revenue being down 2% year-over-year, their operating income at $63 million USD, and net income of $17 million at $0.02 EPS. Along with announcing their Q3 results came word they'd be restructuring the company in Q4 to reduce their global workforce by about 7%, or around 710 employees would be losing their jobs.
This job restructuring is to "better position the company for profitability and long-term growth." This news came down by AMD's new CEO, Lisa Su, that took the reigns earlier this month.
AMD's Q3'2014 results can be found via this news release. Hopefully their Linux-related developers won't see any cutbacks this time around seeing as two years ago they shed some Linux developers and closed their Operating System Research Center.
| 73
| 1,760,719,908.849627
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgxNjA
|
AMD Catalyst AI Performance With "Tonga" On Ubuntu Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
Along with today's R9 285 GPU scaling tests from Ubuntu, other Linux graphics tests I ran from the AMD Radeon R9 285 GCN 1.2 graphics card is a check whether to see Catalyst AI is doing much on Linux.
In the past I've found the Catalyst AI feature exposed by AMD's Catalyst Linux driver to be next to useless: AMD's Catalyst A.I. Is Good For Few Linux Games and AMD Catalyst A.I. Useless Under Linux?. But with this latest Catalyst Linux driver (fglrx 14.30 series) and newest graphics card (R9 285) I decided to run the OpenGL tests again on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Catalyst AI can be enabled from the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition (AMDCCCLE) and defaults to enabling it with the "standard" level but it can be disabled entirely or also set to the "advanced" level. Catalyst AI is supposed to improve the performance for some games with AMD graphics by taking rendering short-cuts or other "secret" optimizations to improve performance -- Catalyst AI isn't supported by the open-source AMD Linux driver.
Once again when testing Catalyst AI on Linux, I didn't find much (any?) performance difference.
You can find all of the test data courtesy of OpenBenchmarking.org.
| 3
| 1,760,719,910.369658
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgxNjU
|
Clover Native Object Code Lands In Mesa
|
Michael Larabel
|
AMD's patches to add support to compiling to native object code for the "Clover" OpenCL state tracker in Mesa's Gallium3D and for the Radeon Gallium3D driver to take advantage of this functionality, has landed.
These native object code patches are important since they can offer better performance and is important for AMD's open-source HSA plans. This is also important given AMD's unified open-source Linux driver plans.
As of yesterday, the Clover native object code generation support is now in Mesa Git in time for the Mesa 10.4 release later this year.
| 1
| 1,760,719,911.681911
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgwODM
|
AMD's Carrizo Gets Temperature Monitoring On Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
The Linux 3.18 kernel will bring support for reading the core temperature of AMD's forthcoming "Carrizo" APUs.
The hwmon pull request sent in for the 3.18 kernel adds support to the k10temp kernel driver for reading temperatures of the "F15h M60h", a.k.a. Carrizo. A small patch is needed to provide support to the temperature driver for Carrizo on Linux.
AMD Carrizo APUs are to feature next-generation Excavator CPU cores and GCN class graphics. The first Carrizo APUs are expected in either December or early 2015 based on current reports. AMD's Excavator architecture brings AVX2 and RDRAND support along with possible DDR4 memory controller support and other improvements over Steamroller.
The hwmon pull request for Linux 3.18 also brings a new MEN14F021P00 BMC HWMON driver. Additionally, several existing drivers were updated to make use of a new hwmon API for the kernel.
| 4
| 1,760,719,912.665537
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgwODU
|
Open-Source AMD Linux Developers Already Thinking About API Improvements
|
Michael Larabel
|
Given yesterday's big update about AMD's unified Linux driver approach and creating a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver, open-source driver developers independent of AMD who have worked on the current Radeon code are already proposing API improvements.
Jerome Glisse, a current Red Hat developer who has long been involved in the open-source AMD/ATI scene going back to the classic xf86-video-avivo days (a driver not many even will know about... it pre-dates RadeonHD), has started proposing some API improvements over what's offered by the current Radeon DRM driver.
Jerome opened, "So if i do not start the discussion now it might be already too late. Given plan to converge open source driver and closed source driver to use a single common kernel driver and that this would be a new kernel driver. This is an opportunity to fix some of the radeon design issues (at least things that i would have done differently if only i could get some gas for my DeLorean)."
For those interested in the technical details, Glisse's message can be found on the dri-devel list. Fortunately, Christian König of AMD has already confirmed they are indeed working on design improvements.
While this new "AMDGPU" driver will only benefit the Radeon Rx 300 "Pirate Islands" GPUs (where we're suspecting it to begin) and future GPUs, at least breaking off to create this new kernel driver allows the developers to evaluate and implement the best interface designs for modern GPUs. The developers are free to experiment (as they have been doing with their prototype Sea Islands support in AMDGPU) and figure out the best design prior to landing the driver in mainline where it must provide a stable interface to user-space without breakage. A lot has been learned over the years by the developers in designing the current Radeon DRM code.
On a side note, as mentioned in yesterday's post, AMD says they plan to start rolling out the new kernel code in stages this fall... Based on the timing of things, it's possible we could see some code proposed ahead of the Linux 3.19 merge window but at this point I'd place my bets on seeing things before the Linux 3.20 merge window.
| 20
| 1,760,719,913.374689
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgwODI
|
AMD Has A CEO Shake-Up Again
|
Michael Larabel
|
The AMD news keeps rolling today... The latest is word hitting the wire that Rory Read has stepped down from AMD.
Rory Read, the CEO, president, and member of the board of directors has stepped down from all three positions today. Read though will stay with AMD in an advisory role until the end of the year.
Succeeding Rory Read as CEO, a title he's held just since 2011, is Lisa Su, the company's former Chief Operating Officer. Lisa is also AMD's first female CEO.
More details via AMD's press release.
| 12
| 1,760,719,914.039899
|
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTgwODE
|
A Look Back: When Everyone Had Problems With ATI/AMD On Linux
|
Michael Larabel
|
If you go back more than seven years ago, lots of people took easy aim at the state of ATI/AMD's Linux graphics drivers. Back then, they didn't even have an open-source strategy... How times have changed.
It was seven years ago from last month that AMD's original open-source GPU driver strategy got started and it was also when they overhauled their Catalyst/fglrx Linux driver that made it much better than where it was in pre-2007 stages. Phoronix exclusives covered all of those details back in the day and today we're now talking about their latest coming of open-source drivers.
AMD's second coming of open-source support was covered this morning during Alex Deucher's XDC2014 Bordeaux presentation how they are unifying their Linux drivers and forming a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver for all future AMD graphics processors.
With AMD's first wave of open-source support was also the launch of the RadeonHD driver project that ended up being short-lived and was initially developed by SUSE in cooperation with AMD. For those curious what started AMD's initial open-source driver support back in the day, you can read SUSE's original proposal to AMD within This Is What Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy.
Anyhow, for those that weren't Linux users in 2007 and prior, here's some remarks made about the state of AMD on Linux back in the day:
- Dell Wants Better ATI Linux Drivers (July 2007)
- Chris DiBona thought closed-source Linux GPUs would collapse if one of the major GPU vendors open-sourced their driver and specs. Well, AMD did it, but his prediction was wrong in that NVIDIA didn't follow suit. His comments were made back in 2007 and in early 2008 was hoping NVIDIA would follow suit after AMD's initial announcement. To this day NVIDIA has just provided limited support to Nouveau on the desktop side though for their Tegra SoCs are becoming more open.
- Mark Shuttleworth had a lot to say to Phoronix after the original ATI/AMD open-source announcement.
- Almost immediately after the September 2007 announcement, open-source developers became more optimistic... Open-Source Developers Speak Out About AMD.
What do you think about AMD's latest open-source play today? What's been your best and worst ATI/AMD Linux memories? Let us know by commenting in the forums. If there's any other classic AMD Linux posts from Phoronix or elsewhere from pre-2007 that are your favorite, be sure to post that as well, those above comments were just the ones that had immediately came to mind when writing this article.
| 20
| 1,760,719,915.38608
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.