AMD News Archives

Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle.

The Linux 7.4 kernel is set to introduce support for a new AMD Zen 6 security feature.

With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel the necessary changes to the AMD P-State driver are set to land for properly supporting the upcoming AMD Ryzen client processors based on the Zen 6 cores.

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn't just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice software updates.

In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version.

While the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series "Gorgon Halo" systems are nearing the marketplace, the NPU support for Linux was seemingly overlooked until now. But at least the simple enablement patch looks like it will arrive for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel.

AMD engineers continue to prepare for upcoming Zen 6 powered Ryzen client processors on Linux.

Those using AMD integrated graphics on Linux such as the beefy Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo hardware will be able to enjoy even better performance with the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel.

The AMDXDNA open-source Linux kernel accelerator driver is seeing a fair amount of work for better supporting current-generation NPU3 neural processing units. The AMD NPU3 is what's found in current AMD Ryzen AI 300 / Ryzen AI 300 PRO series SoCs.

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop.

The AMD BC-250 as the product designed at the time for cryptocurrency mining and based on a cut-down Sony PlayStation 5 APU continues having an interesting second-life being re-tasked for Linux use from general purpose workloads to AI. Sent out this weekend were the latest Linux kernel patches for continuing to enable more of the BC-250.

The newest Linux kernel patches out of AMD for enhancing the upstream support with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors is for enabling SEV-TIO TDISP that is supported with PCI Express 6.0 and beyond.

AMD's GAIA software for building AI agents on your PC and leveraging generative AI locally with the power of AMD Ryzen and Radeon hardware continues becoming more featureful. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.24/0.24.1 and with it comes the ability to transcribe and summarize meeting recordings locally along with other functionality.

Linux 7.4 looks like it will be a very exciting kernel update for AMD customers. On the AMD Radeon graphics side HDMI 2.1 is being enabled by default with the AMDGPU driver with the HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM features in tow. On the AMD Ryzen client CPU side, there will be Zen 6 tuning with the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

A minor reporting issue on Linux that has gone unaddressed until now is for properly conveying the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) sizes on AMD Zen 5 processors.

AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP.

With the Linux kernel still working toward landing support for AMD's RMPOPT optimization for helping to reduce overhead on SEV-SNP enabled servers, the LLVM/Clang compiler has in turn prepped for the milestone by landing support for the RMPOPT, RMPREAD, and RMPCHKD instructions for Zen 5 and newer.

A recently posted Linux kernel patch has revealed a new security improvement with Zen 6 processors.

AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust.

Lemonade 11.9 is out today as the newest feature release to this AMD-backed, open-source local AI server solution across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Lemonade has long been focused on offering "100% free and private" AI use with local hardware whether it be GPUs, CPUs, or NPUs. With Lemonade 11.9's release today it's very interesting for having experimental ROCm HRX back-end support with Llama.cpp. HRX is the new exciting thing to watch out for on the AMD ROCm compute landscape.

Following yesterday's Linux kernel patches for tuning ACPI EPP for Ryzen Zen 6 client processors, another patch series made it out on the mailing list with adjustments for ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) with upcoming Zen 6 client processors.

Earlier this month AMD posted a massive set of patches for bringing up UALink support for the mainline Linux kernel and wiring it up into the AMDGPU kernel driver. In closing out the month of August, they have updated this big set of Ultra Accelerator Link patches.

Ahead of the next-generation AMD Ryzen Zen 6 client processors debuting, an important patch series was posted overnight to the Linux kernel mailing list. These patches provide new Zen 6 client Energy Performance Preference "EPP" tunings that are important for optimizing performance and power consumption for these upcoming AMD Zen 6 desktop and laptop processors.

This summer an intern with the FreeBSD Foundation worked on porting AMD ROCm to FreeBSD. The internship is concluding while the FreeBSD ROCm code is almost to the stage of being able to perform simple vector addition workloads.

The x86 platform driver changes are now in place for the Linux 7.3 kernel with additions for upcoming AMD Zen 6 hardware, the RGB LED driver controls for the Ryzen AI Halo PC, and a lot of laptop support additions and improvements for a variety of devices from different hardware vendors. Plus some handheld gaming device updates too.

Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump... to ROCm 10.0.

For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems.

The AMD GFX1250 IP is what's used by the new Instinct MI450 series accelerators. That's been around within the Linux kernel, AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end, and related codebases the past year. Interestingly merged yesterday is a new "gfx1250-strict" target.

An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4.

Whether coincidental or intentional, AMD engineers tend to drop interesting, feature patches for the open-source/Linux space on Friday afternoons. Hitting the kernel mailing list minutes ago were two patch series sent out by AMDGPU maintainer Alex Deucher for introducing UALink infrastructure.

With the mainline Linux 7.2 kernel there is now the basic support in place for CXL Type-2 accelerator drivers within the CXL core subsystem code. The first in-tree Type-2 driver with the Linux kernel is for the new AMD Solarflare NIC hardware.

Covered first on Phoronix back in June was an AMD Linux patch for introducing a new "low power" CPU core type to complement their typical "performance" cores and their "efficiency" cores like with Zen 4C/5C. That low power core is presumed for some Zen 6 clients and that integration is now merged for Linux 7.3 as well as unifying the Intel/AMD CPU core type handling.

AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU.

AMD has a tendency to send out large feature patch series for their open-source Linux drivers on Friday afternoons/evenings. Today we were greeted by a set of 109 patches working on RAS support for the upcoming AMD GFX12.1 target.

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements.

FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella.

The newest ROCm component for AMD's open-source GPU compute stack is Spur as an AI-native, Rust-written job scheduler for scaling up GPU workloads to multi-thousand GPU clusters.

AMD has posted patches proposing a new Linux subsystem for the Enhanced Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI) standard that was in turn originally developed by Intel. With AMD now making use of eSPI, they are proposing a new subsystem for it within the Linux kernel, which includes a new driver for their hardware.

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6.

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture.

Sent out last night was the last batch of planned AMD P-State driver feature improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window.

In an interesting twist, patches this week posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are enabling AMD Zen 6 client desktop and laptop SoCs for the HSMP driver. Up to now the AMD HSMP Linux driver was just used for modern EPYC server processors while now we are seeing this HSMP driver supporting the upcoming Medusa and Olympic Ridge client platforms... Including mentions of overclocking and even noting "Ryzen Master" as the Windows-only software for overclocking and system management.

A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck.

Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points.

Last month I wrote bout new AMD Linux patches introducing a new "low power" CPU core type as an alternative to their standard performance cores and dense efficiency cores. That work now is poised to land with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel.

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward.

At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in "open" mentions and a ramp that's been building each year at the AMD events.

After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development.

In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers.

Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack.