The Freedreno Gallium3D driver as the community-based, open-source 3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware will have OpenGL 3.1 support with the upcoming Mesa 11.1 release...
AMD this morning officially launched the Radeon R9 380X, a graphics card using an Antigua GPU, which is a re-brand of the year-old Tonga graphics processor. The R9 380X pricing starts out at $229 USD...
Intel quietly released the XenGT 2015-Q3 release at the end of October as the newest quarterly update to their mediated graphics passthrough solution for virtualization customers...
An unheard of independent developer has proclaimed designing a new, fast, and unbreakable encryption algorithm. While he admits to not being a mathematician or cryptoanalyst, he's wanting to get this encryption algorithm in the mainline Linux kernel and distributions...
It's already been a surprising year with Microsoft's many open-source/Linux-related announcements and 2015 isn't even over yet! There's another interesting announcement today...
Now that Linux 4.4-rc1 was released this weekend as the first development release towards Linux 4.4 with its many new features, I'm onto benchmarking it at Phoronix for articles looking at the Nouveau Kepler re-clocking changes, Radeon/Intel graphics performance too, file-system tests, and more...
Following Monday's NVIDIA Jetson TX1 performance overview one of the first follow-up tests I wanted to carry out was to see how the performance would evolve if using a newer compiler than what's shipped in Ubuntu 14.04. This current long-term support release ships GCC 4.8 while out since then was GCC 4.9 and now GCC 5.2.1 with GCC 6 coming in just a few months.
NVIDIA yesterday released the 358.13 Linux graphics driver as the newest mainline driver. This week, however, they've also updated their legacy drivers for X.Org Server 1.18...
Just days after writing about GPUCC as Google's open-source CUDA compiler built atop LLVM and how to compile CUDA code with LLVM, more improvements have landed...
Last weekend I ran benchmarks looking at the performance of the AMDGPU DRM driver with the new PowerPlay patches for providing proper power management support for Tonga and Fiji graphics cards. In today's article is a larger comparison when running this latest Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver code to see how these newer AMD GPUs compare to existing, well-supported Radeon graphics cards.
Jonas Ã…dahl announced the formation this morning of the Wayland-Protocols Git repository that will march to its own beat, separate of Wayland/Weston releases...
After a half-year of development, I'm ecstatic to announce this morning the release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 (codenamed "Hammerfest"). Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 is by far the most significant release ever done of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software and framework since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 seven years ago.
For those that haven't been paying attention to SPIR-V as the new intermediate representation that makes up OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan, here's various details about this newest Khronos Group specification you may not be familiar with now that Khronos formally released OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V 1.0....
Early this morning I wrote a brief article about AMD working on an LLVM-based Heterogeneous Compute Compiler and since then more details have come to light...
The Khronos Group has formally released the OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V 1.0 specifications coinciding with this year's SuperComputing conference in Austin...
While last week we were able to write about the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 development board, at that time we weren't able to share any benchmarks or hands-on experience with this ARM board powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC. The embargo on that has now expired and as such this morning there are a lot of benchmarks to share with you. There are many benchmarks looking at different areas of the Jetson TX1 including power consumption and thermal. For kicks I've also done some comparisons against the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 as well as other ARM hardware like the now defunct Calxeda ARM server and Raspberry Pi 2.
High-end PC maker Falcon Northwest has decided against rolling out any Steam Machines this year powered by Valve's Debian-based SteamOS, due to problems with the operating system...
AMD has been open-sourcing several components of their Linux HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) stack for the past several months including the AMDKFD kernel driver and HSAKMT run-time. In cooperation with SUSE, they also hope to have HSA accelerator support in GCC 6. Besides the GCC support, AMD is apparently planning to publish a Heterogeneous Compute Compiler...
Last month I wrote about how Google has been working on CUDA compiler optimizations in LLVM and they were claiming to achieve results where their open-source compiler work was generating better code than NVIDIA's own NVCC compiler. More details are now available...
If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window will end today with the release of the 4.4-rc1 kernel. As all of the major subsystem updates have already landed for Linux 4.4, here's my usual look at the highlights for this kernel cycle.
In addition to adding some new OpenCL / CUDA tests this week to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, Caffe was added too as a deep learning benchmark...
Just one week after Mesa Git received Nouveau NVC0 compute support, the NV50 Gallium3D driver for pre-Fermi GPUs has also received basic compute support...
With the Linux 4.3 Git tree at around 20.6 million lines of code, documentation, and utilities, I was curious to see whether the Linux 4.4 merge window was heavy enough to bump it over 21 million lines.....
With PHP 7.0 RC7 being the final development version of PHP 7, which is expected to be officially release at the end of the month, I've carried out some fresh benchmarks of PHP using our in-house benchmarking software. Compared in this latest PHP 7 benchmarking comparison is PHP 5.5 as packaged on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and then comparing fresh builds of PHP 5.6.15 and PHP 7.0.0 RC7. On the HHVM side was using Facebook's HHVM 3.10.1 release as packaged for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
After months of continually trying out different methods of cheap yet effective cooling for the 60+ systems running daily Linux benchmarks, I'm finally happy with now having been one week of the room maintaining an ambient temperature of 68~72F (20~22C)...
LLVM developers have decided to enable a new vectorizer option by default that has the potential to boost performance, but the performance benefits aren't immediately clear...