AMD GFX9.4.4 CDNA Firmware Published, More GFX950 Changes Point To Being MI350

There are some new open-source/Linux details to note when it comes to the AMD accelerators in the Instinct “CDNA” land.

Since writing last week about AMD GFX950 patches beginning to appear within the LLVM 20 Git codebase for the AMDGPU shader back-end, GFX950 patches have continued and are on the heavier side…

As of writing there are now 77 pull requests relating to the AMD GFX950 with the compiler back-end support and more than 62 patches have been merged so far into LLVM Git. These pulls are for supporting a number of new instructions with GFX950, a new scheduler model, and other changes but mostly pertaining to new instructions with the GFX950 target.

With all of these GFX950 changes building up over the existing GFX94x targets, it would seem to align with being for the Instinct MI350 series due out in 2025 rather than the MI325X… Plus if GFX950 was the MI325X, AMD’s open-source upstream driver support there would be very tardy and much later than we are used to seeing of new hardware support upstreamed months in advance of launch. So given the timing of this GFX950 upstreaming work and the number of changes, it’s looking more solid that GFX950 is indeed the graphics IP of the Instinct MI350 series.

Separately, hitting the linux-firmware.git tree of firmware binaries today were a number of AMD GPU updates/additions. Notable there is adding GC 9.4.4 firmware. The timing of that and AMD typically not committing public firmware binaries until closer to new launches would seem to indicate that GC 4.4.4 / GFX944 correlates to the Instinct MI325X.

Also added alongside GC 9.4.4 were PSP 13.0.14, SDMA 4.4.5, and SMU 13.0.14 IP firmware. Plus updates to the firmware files for many existing Instinct/Radeon products.

Long story short, AMD’s open-source/Linux graphics driver engineers remain quite busy with GFX950 enablement that looks like it is for the Instinct MI350 series. This follows the engineers having spent the past several months prior working on the RDNA4 upstreaming on the consumer Radeon side to prep for launch-day Linux support.