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NVIDIA Announces Grace CPU For ARM-Based AI/HPC Processor

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 12:43 p.m. | Original

NVIDIA announced today in kicking off GTC21 the "Grace" high performance Arm processor for AI and high performance computing workloads. But before getting too excited, this high performance Arm chip isn't expected to be ready until 2023.

NVIDIA's Grace CPU is set to debut in 2023 as a high performance processor built on next-gen Arm Neoverse IP. Grace will support NVLink 4 communication with the company's graphics cards.

Grace will be NVIDIA's first data center

Radeon Vulkan Variable Rate Shading Benchmarks For Boosting RDNA2 Performance

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 11:26 a.m. | Original

Landing in Mesa 21.1 on Friday was a variable rate shading (VRS) override for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver for providing significant performance boosts by effectively rendering less . This feature is limited to RDNA2 graphics processors while here are some benchmarks on what it means for 4K gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards on Linux.

The Mesa RADV driver has Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support for trading less rendering for higher performance. The driver allows setting an environment variable

KDE KWin Introducing Item-Based Scenes For Improved Wayland Support

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 8:02 a.m. | Original

More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe.

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii has been working on furthering along the KWin compositor's Wayland support with one of his latest undertakings to adapt the compositor's existing window-level-focused scene structure into an item-based scene. The items in turn can represent individual surfaces like tooltips, server-side decoration items, etc. This opens up per-item damage tracking and other possible improvements moving forward and potentially a scene/render graph.

As for what has

Intel DG1 Graphics Card Nears Working State On Linux

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 7 a.m. | Original

While these kernel patches aren't expected to land until the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle later in the summer, a set of 19 patches published on Monday morning begin allowing a test system to boot with the DG1 graphics card.

Intel's open-source driver engineers continue pushing a lot of Linux patches around DG1 specifically and other underlying driver changes for being able to support discrete graphics processors with their i915 kernel driver.

It's been a lengthy bring-up given that

MSM DRM Driver Picks Up Initial Support For The Snapdragon SC7280

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 5:59 a.m. | Original

The MSM DRM driver changes have been sent to DRM-Next for this Freedreno aligned project providing open-source graphics/display driver support for Qualcomm SoCs.

Most notable to the MSM driver changes slated for Linux 5.13 is the initial support for the SC7280, a forthcoming Snapdragon SoC that has seen rumors and various information in recent weeks. The SC7280 SoC so far has surfaced within reports about future Google Chromebooks. Details on the SC7280 remain light.

Intel

Intel Rocket Lake Target Added To GCC 11

Phoronix | April 12, 2021, 5:44 a.m. | Original

While Intel is often very proactive in adding new CPU families to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers where it tends to land a year or more in advance of the processors actually shipping, occasionally there are slipups. Today in fact the "Rocket Lake" support finally was merged into GCC 11 days ahead of that compiler release and after the CPUs were already launched at the end of March.

This morning the Rocket Lake support was merged so users/developers can enjoy the likes of -march=rocketlake

Linux 5.12-rc7 Kernel Released - It's Big And Causing Some Concern

Phoronix | April 11, 2021, 6:47 p.m. | Original

The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate.

Following last weekend's "positively tiny" Linux 5.12-rc6 kernel , Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.12-rc7 a few minutes ago. The 5.12 kernel has bumped back to being larger than expected for this late stage of development. Linus has yet to decide if this will mean an extra week's worth of testing or if things are looking

Linux 5.13 Will Stop Restricting CPU Power Metrics Access For AMD Energy Driver

Phoronix | April 11, 2021, 12:53 p.m. | Original

Following the PLATYPUS discovery last year that CPU energy information could be used for possible side channel attacks , the Intel RAPL counters were not only restricted to root but the "amd_energy" driver for exposing CPU energy information on supported Zen series CPUs was also dialed back to root-only in the name of security. Linux 5.13 is introducing a new mechanism so AMD CPUs will be able to still read the energy counters even if not operating as root.

Linux hardware monitoring subsystem (HWMON) maintainer Guenter Roeck

Dynatron A38 Performance For Cooling 280 Watt AMD EPYC CPUs

Phoronix | April 11, 2021, 8:37 a.m. | Original

Announced in March by Dynatron was their A38 CPU cooler for AMD Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors. This heatsink fan is rated for cooling up to 280 Watt SP3/sTRX4/TR4 processors making it capable of cooling even the newest high-end EPYC "Milan" processors with the EPYC 75F3 and 7763 processors. Here are some initial benchmarks of this cooler with the AMD EPYC 7763 server processor.

Intel

SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13

Phoronix | April 11, 2021, 6:05 a.m. | Original

Arguably the most interesting RISC-V board announced to date is SiFive's HiFive Unmatched with the FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The HiFive Unmatched also has 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. The upstream kernel support for the HiFive Unmatched and the FU740 SoC continues

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