With Q1 drawing to an end, here is a look back at the most popular Linux/open-source news and Linux hardware reviews around AMD during the quarter on Phoronix. With 109 AMD news articles so far this quarter around their Linux software/hardware efforts and another 20 AMD Linux hardware reviews / featured benchmark articles, they continue firing on all cylinders for pushing both their client and server wares forward outside the confines of Windows.
Similar to this weekend’s look at the most popular Intel Linux/OSS news for Q1-2025, below is a look at the most popular AMD news on Phoronix for the quarter along with the most popular featured articles/reviews.
Between the AMD RDNA 4 launch with the Radeon RX 9070 series, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D / 9950X3D now shipping, and a lot of new investments into AMD software offerings, it was an exciting Q1 for them. And Q2 is looking to be very exciting too, stay tuned.
AMD Announces “Instella” Fully Open-Source 3B Language Models
Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.
Steam On Linux Ends 2024 With A Nice Boost To Its Marketshare, AMD Linux CPU Use At 74%
Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2024 and they reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times.
AMDGPU VirtIO Native Context Merged: Native AMD Driver Support Within Guest VMs
An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making… AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.
Latest AVX-512 Optimization For FFmpeg Shows Wild Improvement On AMD Ryzen
Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path… Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code.
AMD Announces The AMDGPU Composition Stack “ACS” For Advanced Linux Desktop Features
An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers… The AMDGPU Composition Stack “ACS” is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.
New Linux Patches Enhance AMD Radeon Video Encode/Decode For Older GPUs
Since Raven/Picasso APUs and Navi GPUs there is Video Core Next (VCN) as the modern unified video encode/decode block for Radeon graphics. But for those with older Radeon GPUs where there are the Unified Video Decode (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) blocks, a set of Mesa patches is looking to enhance the video acceleration support on Linux systems.
Linux 6.13 Released With AutoFDO + Propeller, AMD Changes & Broader Apple Support
As anticipated the Linux 6.13 kernel was promoted to stable today with an on-time release and in turn also marking the start of the Linux 6.14 merge window. Linux 6.13 stable has plenty of fine features for this first major kernel release of 2025.
Alibaba Engineers Work To Address Suspend/Resume Bugs With The AMD Graphics Driver
Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.
Linux 6.15 Goes Very Heavy On Intel & AMD x86_64 CPU Changes
Merged today for the recently-opened Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the “x86/core” changes that are particularly heavy on new feature work for both Intel and AMD x86/x86_64 processors. This is easily quite one of the most significant Intel/AMD CPU set of updates in a given kernel cycle in quite some time.
Tiny Corp Nearing “Completely Sovereign” Compute Stack For AMD GPUs With Tinygrad
George Hotz’ Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a “completely sovereign” software stack for GPU compute on AMD.
Linux 6.14 Released With Working NTSYNC Driver, AMD Ryzen AI Accelerator Support
There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise… Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what’s set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases.
Firefox 136 Available With AMD GPU Linux Video Acceleration, AArch64 Linux Binaries
Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow’s official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times.
Firefox 136 Beta Finally Enables Hardware Video Decoding For AMD GPUs On Linux By Default
With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux.
Open-Source 0 A.D. RTS Game Adds AMD FSR Support & Vulkan Renderer
It’s been a while since having anything new to report on the 0 A.D. open-source real-time strategy (RTS) game but this week marked the 0 A.D. Alpha 27 release that they also hope will be their last alpha version.
AMD Readies More Graphics Driver Improvements For Linux 6.15
Last week AMD sent out a big batch of new graphics driver code for Linux 6.15 including new GPU support, OEM i2c support for RGB lighting and other features, and other updates. Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code targeting the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window was sent out on Friday.
AMD Preparing New GPU Support For Their Kernel Graphics Driver In Linux 6.15
AMD has sent out their initial pull request of “new stuff” for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver of feature additions they want to make for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel. Most notable from this week’s submission to DRM-Next is preparing a lot of new GPU hardware support.
Mesa 25.0 Released With Vulkan 1.4 Driver Support, AMD RDNA4 Ready
Mesa 25.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers used on Linux systems by multiple hardware vendors.
The Most Interesting Linux 6.14 Features From NTSYNC To AMD Ryzen AI & Rust Abstractions
Barring any last minute issues or hesitation by Linus Torvalds, the Linux 6.14 kernel is aiming for releasing as stable this coming Sunday on 23 March. Here’s a reminder about some of the most interesting changes to find with Linux 6.14.
ollama 0.6.2 Released WIth Support For AMD Strix Halo
The ollama open-source software that makes it easy to run Llama 3, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models is out with its newest release. The ollama software makes it easy to leverage the llama.cpp back-end for running a variety of LLMs and enjoying convenient integration with other desktop software.
FFmpeg Adds AMD AMF Decoder, FSR-Based Upscaling
Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg.
And the most popular AMD hardware reviews for the quarter:
AMD Ryzen 9000 vs. Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake On Linux For Q1-2025 In ~400 Benchmarks
For those wondering how the latest AMD Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 “Arrow Lake” desktop processors are battling it out on Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with the latest software updates as well as the newest system BIOS updates for a fresh, all-new look at these Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs on Linux.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance
Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delivers Excellent Performance For Linux Developers, Creators & Technical Computing
Ahead of tomorrow’s availability of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPUs in retail channels, today the embargo lifts on being able to deliver Ryzen 9 9950X3D reviews and performance benchmarks. Simply put, for Linux creators, developers, enthusiasts, and others running technical computing workloads and other similar tasks on their desktop, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D with its 16 cores / 32 threads and 144MB total cache makes for an excellent desktop CPU. In this review are around 400 Linux benchmarks looking at the captivating performance and competitive power efficiency of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
The Compelling AVX-512 Performance Advantage On AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin”
Back in October following the launch of the EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors I ran an AVX-512 performance comparison for the EPYC 9755 with 512-bit data path vs. 256-bit data path vs. AVX-512 disabled. That was interesting for showing the benefits of Zen 5’s full 512-bit data path support compared to the “double pumped” approach with Zen 4 or optionally used via a BIOS option on Zen 5. AVX-512 continues to prove to be very performant and power efficient with AMD Zen 5 processors unlike with the early generations of AVX-512 on Intel processors. Here is a fresh look at the AVX-512 performance on a Supermicro server with an AMD EPYC 9655 processor.
Healthy Competition With GCC 15 vs. LLVM Clang 20 Performance On AMD Zen 5
In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance
In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today’s embargo lift, I’ve also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.
Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Performance For The AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series
With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company’s official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.
GCC 15 Compiler Showing Off Nice Performance Improvements On AMD Zen 5
With the GCC 15 compiler having progressed to its final stage of development prior to the GCC 15.1 stable release in the likely March~April time frame, I’ve begun testing the updated GNU Compiler Collection on some test systems. Overall GCC 15 is looking nice and on AMD Zen 5 “znver5” in particular seeing some solid gains over GCC 14. Here are some initial performance benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler.
AMD’s 3D V-Cache Optimizer Driver For Squeezing More Ryzen 9 9950X3D Performance
Merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel was the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for being able to influence the kernel’s scheduling decisions on AMD processors where only a subset of CCDs have the larger 3D V-Cache. With this new driver users can communicate their cache vs. frequency preference for influencing where new tasks are first placed if on the CCD with the larger L3 cache or with the higher frequency potential. Here is a look at the impact of using the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver with the new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
SMT Remains Very Advantageous For 5th Gen AMD EPYC Performance
After recently re-visiting the AMD EPYC 9005 series AVX-512 performance, I followed up with some fresh SMT benchmarks looking at the performance benefits and power of toggling Simultaneous Multi-Threading on the 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” hardware. Here are some fresh numbers looking at the SMT performance with AMD Zen 5 server processors.
