AMD news

• Sensor Fusion Hub Driver For AMD Laptops With Gyroscopes Is Coming To Linux 5.11
  
  
  It's been a long and hard road to acceptance for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub Linux driver. The first revision was submitted to the Linux kernel Mailing List in January 2020. It took eight revisions and a lot of effort before Jiří Kosina finally accepted it into the hid.git#for-5.11 tree, almost guaranteeing that it will become a part of Linux 5.11.
  
• AMDVLK 2020.Q4.1 Is Released With A New Vulkan Extension And Three Game-Specific Fixes
  
  
  AMD has released a new version of their AMDVLK Vulkan driver for Linux with support for one new Vulkan extensions and game-specific fixes for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Second Extinction and X-plane. Performance is still overall worse than the AMD RADV Vulkan driver that comes with Mesa 20.2.0 and performance is much worse in specific graphics benchmarks and image up-scaling.
  
• Linux 5.9 Is Released With New Drivers, Improved AMD GPU Support, And Support The x86-64 FSGSBASE CPU Instructions
  
  
  It was a bumpy release-cycle for Linux 5.9 with one release candidate refusing to show anything graphical on Intel GPUs. The final 5.9 release doesn't have that problem. It has have quite a lot of new features such as support for upcoming AMD graphics cards, support for the FSGSBASE x86-64 instructions, a Corsair RGB hub and a lot more.
  
• AMD Hopes To Get Sensor Fusion Hub Driver For AMD Laptop Gyroscopes And Other Sensors Into Linux 5.10
  
  
  AMD's Sandeep Singh has submitted yet another revision of AMD's Linux HID driver for the Sensor Fusion Hub hardware in all AMD laptops based on Ryzen processors. That makes it eight in total. This could be the lucky revision that makes it into the Linux kernel when the Linux 5.10 merge window opens up on Monday.
  
• AMD Announces Four 5000-Series Ryzen CPUs
  
  
  AMD announced four new 5000-series Zen3 processors in a marketing presentation titled "Where Gaming Begins" today. The processors have 6 to 16 cores and base clocks between 3.4 and 3.8 GHz with boost clocks up to 4.9 GHz. TDP is listed as 105W for all but the 6-core model. The new processors will have a MSRP between $300 and $800 when they reach stores on November 5th, 2020. AMD claims the processors will have a 19% IPC performance uplift.
  
• DXVK DirectX To Vulkan Translation Layer 1.7.2 Released
  
  
  The latest DXVK Direct3D 9 to 11 to Vulkan translation layer has seven game-specific fixes and some Direxct3D 9 fixes specific to AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver. DXVK can be used as an alternative to Wine's own wined3d DX 9-11 to OpenGL translation layer while we wait for Wine to get their own C-implemented DX 9-11 to Vulkan back-end ready.
  
• Linux 5.9-rc8 Is Out With PCIe IDs for AMDs Upcoming Sienna Cichlid GPUs
  
  
  We have examined the latest Linux 5.9 release candidate and found that it is actually possible to use it to boot and start X or Wayland on machines with Intel processors using Intel integrated graphics with this latest kernel release-candidate. That is an improvement since the total train-wreck disaster released as Linux 5.9-rc7.
  
• AMDVLK v-2020.Q3.6 Is Released With Four Game-Specific Fixes
  
  
  The latest AMDVLK driver has one new Vulkan extension and game-specific fixes for Doom VFR, Baldur's Gate 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2. AMDVLK's performance is still worse, in some cases far worse, than what the RADV Mesa Vulkan driver from Mesa 20.2.0 offers. AMDVLK v-2020.Q3.6 does offer better compatibility so it may be worth installing it side-by-side the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver if you own a AMD graphics card.
  
• AMD ROCm 3.8 Is Released
  
  
  The latest AMD Radeon Open Compute graphics stack offers absolutely dismal OpenCL performance in the LuksMark benchmark compared to the Mesa Clover OpenCL library from the newly released Mesa 20.2.0 graphics stack. It does have one thing going for it: It does support OpenCL 2.0, something Mesa Clover does not.
  
• Support For Mysterious AMD VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish GPUs Merged To The Mesa RadeonSI OpenGL Driver
  
  
  AMD merged support for two new graphics chips into the RadeonSI Mesa OpenGL driver for AMD graphics cards today: CHIP_DIMGREY_CAVEFISH and CHIP_VANGOGH. The patches were written back in July 2020. Dimgrey Cavefish is placed in the Navi (FAMILY_NV) family while VanGogh is something different. Both chips are in the GFX10 family with the features AMD markets as "RDNA2".
  
• AMD At The X.Org Developers Conference 2020: No-No Baking Your Graphics Card
  
  
  Linux kernel developer Rajneesh Bhardwaj from AMD's Radeon Open Compute team warned that you should absolutely not bake your graphics card at the X.Org developers conference this week. He explained the dangers and stressed "Don't try this at home!". He went on to detail the many runtime power management advancements the amdgpu kernel driver for AMD graphics cards has seen the last year.
  
• How the ACO Mesa Vulkan Shader Compiler For AMD GPUs Came To Be: From Prototype To Default
  
  
  The Vulkan ACO shader compiler for AMD graphics cards on Linux will be the default shader compiler when Mesa 20.2 is released later this month. Developer Timor Kristóf held a 40 minutes long and interesting talk about the development process and the efforts behind making ACO a reality at the The X.Org Developers Conference 2020. Here it is.
  
• AV1 Hardware Video Decode Support For AMD RX 6000 Series GPUs Coming In Linux 5.10
  
  
  AMD has historically been extremely slow compared to Nvidia and Intel when it comes to providing hardware video encoding and decoding capabilities for open video standards like VP8 and VP9. New patches by AMD Open Source Laboratory developer Alex Deucher show that AMD won't be dragging their feet for years before they add AV1 video decoding support to their hardware, it is already there in the upcoming RX 6000 series GPUs. VP9 and AV1 video encoding support is still severely lacking.
  
• AMD Reveals Picture Of RX 6000 Series GPU With 2 8-Pin PSU Connectors
  
  
  AMD has revealed a single picture of a RX 6000 series graphics card with three fans and two eight-pin power connectors. They shared no details beyond it being a "upcoming #RDNA2" card with a "brand new cooler design". What we can educationally guess from the latest Linux kernel code is that these cards will have sdma 5.2 and new a new display core called "Display Core Next 3.0".
  
• AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 Alternative AMD Vulkan Driver Released With Four Game Specific Fixes And Sub-RADV Performance
  
  
  AMD has released a new version of their special "open source" Vulkan driver with game-specific fixes for Detroit: Become Human, Tropico 4, Doom 2016 and GTA IV. Vulkan API compliance is updated to Vulkan 1.2.152. Performance is overall slightly worse than what the latest Mesa RADV Vulkan driver provides and magnitudes worse in very specific GPU stress tests.
  
• Linux 5.9 Brings Hardware Accelerated Video Playback To 10+ Year Old AMD Graphics Cards Using The "amdgpu" Linux Kernel Driver
  
  
  AMD kicked off their HD 7000 series graphics cards with the launch of the Radeon HD 7970 code-named "Tahiti" in December 2011. Linux users are finally able to get working Hardware Video Decoding and Vulkan support on these and other older AMD graphics cards using the Linux kernel's "amdgpu" driver.
  
• AMD Radeon Open Compute Framework 3.7 Released
  
  
  AMD released a new version of their Radeon Open Compute framework this weekend. This is the first ROCm version with official support for Ubuntu 20.04. There is also support for OpenMP 5.0 and direct GPU-to-GPU communications in the ROCm Communications Collective Library.
  
• Linux AV1 Hardware Video Decoding Support Ready For Intel Tiger Lake
  
  
  The Intel Tiger Lake processors coming in September 2020 will be the first Intel processors with integrated graphics capable of decoding, but not encoding, AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) in hardware. Linux support for AV1 hardware decoding was merged into the libva VAAPI in March. Fei Wang submitted patches allowing ffmpeg to take advantage of that support yesterday. That makes it trivial to add AV1 hardware decoding support to end-user players like VLC and mpv.
  
• Some Proprietary AMD GPU Source Code Has Leaked
  
  
  Someone going by the e-mail nickname "palesaferns" leaked a number of Hardware Definition Language (HDL) source code files for the AMD Navi graphics cards to a GitHub repository. That repository was swiftly yet too-lately removed by GitHub-owner Microsoft at the behest of AMD. The released stolen source code tree has code for Navi10 and empty folders for other graphics chips like the "Arden" GPU in the coming XBox Series X which indicates that the leaker is also in possession of those source files as well. AMD has issued a statement saying that they "believe the stolen graphics IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of our graphics products".
  
• Mesa 20.0.0-rc1 Is Released With Vulkan 1.2 Support and Iris As New Default Intel OpenGL Driver
  
  
  Linux machines with Intel graphics chips are currently using the aging i965 Mesa graphics driver for OpenGL. Intel has been working on a fancy new OpenGL driver called Iris for some time. That driver will be the new default driver for gen8+ Intel graphics chips in Mesa 20. Iris brings slightly better performances compared to the old i965 driver. There will also be full Vulkan 1.2 support in Mesa 20.
  
• Mesa 19.3.2 Is Released With SDMA Disabled On Older AMD GPUs
  
  
  The latest stable version of the Mesa graphics stack has SDMA disabled in the RadeonSI OpenGL backend on AMD GFX8-series graphics cards due to a few reported cases of graphics corruption in OpenGL games on AMD RX 580 graphics cards. The result will be a 0-4% performance-penalty on a older graphics cards ranging from the R9 285 to the RX 580.
  
• Mesa 20 Will Have SDMA Disabled On AMD RX-Series GPUs
  
  
  A few bug reports describing corruption on a few OpenGL games on RX 580 GPUs has prompted AMD developers to disable SDMA in the RadeonSI Mesa OpenGL driver on GFX8-series graphics cards. The result will be a 0 to 4% reduction in OpenGL performance in the upcoming Mesa 20 release.
  
• AMD Announced 8 Core Laptop APUs and CPUs and a 64 Core Threadripper CPU at CES 2020
  
  
  AMD announced an 8-core mobile APU with a 1.8 GHz base clock and an 8-core mobile CPU with a 2.8 GHz base clock for laptops at this year's CES. There was nothing exciting on the desktop GPU front, AMD announced a new mid-range desktop GPU and two mobile GPUs. They also announced a new 64-core Threadripper CPU at a $4000 price-tag.
  
• AMD finally submits kernel patch for broken RDRAND on older AMD APUs
  
  
  It only took 5 years for AMD to submit a kernel patch which doesn't even fix RDRAND being broken on older AMD APUs after suspend. Their kernel patch "fixes" the problem by completely disabling the RDRAND instruction on all family 15 and 16 APUs and CPUs from AMD - even those not affected by this particular issue.
  
• AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs will not be able to boot modern Linux distributions for another "few" weeks
  
  
  3000-series AMD Ryzen CPUs return broken data when RDRAND is called. That causes boot failure modern Linux distributions using systemd >=240. AMD was very quiet about this major flaw in their CPUs until Windows users noticed that some Windows game called Destiny II crashes due to it's reliance on the RDRAND instruction. AMD finally admitted the problem and promised a BIOS fix on July 12th.
  
• Biostar BIOSes enabling PCIe Gen 4 on AMD 400-series Motherboards are available
  
  
  Taiwanese computer giant Biostar has released BIOS updates for several 400 series motherboards which enables fourth generation PCI Express on the first x16 slow as well as the M.2 NVMe slot if a Ryzen 3000 CPU is used.
  
• AMD Navi Support is merged into the upcoming Linux Kernel 5.3
  
  
  Linux kernel creator and architect Linus Torvalds has accepted the proposed Direct Rendering Management code required for AMD Navi GPU support from DRM maintainer Dave Airlie and merged it into the Linux kernel git tree. This ensures that the upcoming 5.3 version of the Linux Kernel will support these new GPUs. Kernel support is required for the Vulkan and OpenGL support the upcoming 19.2 version of the Mesa graphics stack will have for the newly released AMD Navi GPUs.
  
• AMD Admits Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs are Broken, promises BIOS update
  
  
  AMD claims to have figured out why their new Ryzen 3000 CPUs are unable to produce random data when the RDRAND instruction is called. They promise that a BIOS update will be made available shortly. This is good news for those who want to run modern Linux distributions or Windows games like Destiny 2 on these chips since it is currently impossible to use any software which takes advantage of the RDRAND instruction on AMDs flawed new CPUs.
  
• AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs can't do Random on boot causing Boot Failure on newer Linux distributions
  
  
  The fun part is that very old AMD APUs have a very similar well-known problem with it's implementation of the CPU instruction RDRAND. systemd implemented a work-around for it back in May but distributions do not have it since there has been no stable systemd releases since then. The result is that newer distributions - with the exception of Debian 10 - will simply fail to boot on Ryzen 3000 series CPUs due to a bug in those CPUs which causes them to fail to produce random data when RDRAND is called early in the boot process.
  
• RDRAND stops returning random values on older AMD CPUs after suspend
  
  
  Systemd versions past 239 will fail to start or restart any service after a suspend to RAM on the AX-XXXX and EX-XXXX series AMD APUs after they have been suspended. The root cause of this bug is a hardware bug in these AMD CPUs who will happily return -1 (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF) instead of a random number after they have been suspended.