When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest.
When it came to the most popular Intel Linux/open-source news of 2025 on Phoronix, many of the top stories were about their changes as a result of layoffs, corporate restructuring, and other ongoing changes at the company. To much dismay, Intel’s Clear Linux project was shutdown this year, a number of prominent Linux kernel engineers left Intel, and impacts to their other open-source projects. Here is a look at the most-viewed Intel news of 2025:
Intel Announces It’s Shutting Down Clear Linux
The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what’s possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware… Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.
Mysterious Intrigue Around An x86 “Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD”
Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and GNU Binutils mailing list today is an intriguing message from a longtime x86/x86_64 expert around a “a corporate entity other than Intel/AMD” using some x86 opcodes not used by AMD or Intel processors.
Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations Can Boost GPU Compute Performance By 20%
While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance.
Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Well, it’s an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel’s corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel’s CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.
KDE Plasma 6.4.5 Released With Fix For “Extreme Stuttering” On Intel Graphics
KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is out today as the newest monthly point release for the current Plasma 6.4 desktop series. Making this month’s Plasma 6 point release notable are a number of KWin compositor fixes.
Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel’s recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel… The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.
KDE Plasma 6.6 To Support Intel’s Adaptive Sharpness Feature
KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6.
Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Leaves The Company
Amid Intel’s ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there’s been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.
Latest Intel Engineering Layoffs Lead To An Intel Linux Driver Being Orphaned
The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now “orphaned” due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.
Linus Torvalds Continues Using A Radeon RX 580 Graphics Card, Back On An Intel Laptop
The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 “Polaris” graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old. The nine year old Polaris graphics cards have aged well in the marketplace and are an affordable choice. For Linux users they continue enjoying strong open-source driver support. It turns out Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself is still relying on an AMD Radeon RX 580 with one of his main systems.
Linux 6.16 Released – Better Performance, NVIDIA Blackwell Open-Source & Intel APX
As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements.
The Former Lead For Apple Graphics Drivers On Linux Is Now Working At Intel
There’s a follow-up to yesterday’s surprising story of Alyssa Rosenzweig stepping away from Asahi Linux and that ARM graphics driver work where she led reverse engineering and development of the Asahi Gallium3D and HoneyKrisp Vulkan drivers within Mesa. She’s now working at Intel on their Linux graphics drivers.
An Intel Fellow & Prominent Linux Performance Engineer Resigns From Intel
There have been many Intel Linux/open-source software engineers to leave the company over the past year among other setbacks for their Linux/open-source initiatives. Announced this Friday night is one of their highest profile departures of the year as it pertains to their Linux efforts.
Intel Core 2 CPUs Have Been Affected By An Annoying Linux Kernel Bug For 5+ Years
A fix was merged to the Linux 6.14 kernel on Friday — and also for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels over the coming days — for fixing an annoying problem with Intel Core 2 processors. The problem, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2019, could lead to system stalls and boot delays for those still using Intel Core 2 CPUs with modern distributions.
Intel AVX10 Drops Optional 512-bit: No AVX10 256-bit Only E-Cores In The Future
Intel updated their AVX10 whitepaper and associated open-source compiler patches around this next Advanced Vector Extensions standard… While AVX10 had intended to allow either 256-bit or 512-bit modes depending upon processor capabilities, Intel has dropped the 256-bit-only approach and going for 512-bit everywhere. Thus it would seem to indicate that Intel E cores of the future will properly support AVX 512-bit operation!
ollama Rolls Out Experimental Vulkan Support For Expanded AMD & Intel GPU Coverage
The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support.
Intel’s Lead Engineer For Linux Performance Monitoring Is Leaving The Company
This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire.
Gzip 1.14 Released With Faster Decompression On Intel & AMD CPUs
Gzip 1.14 released earlier today as the first new release to this widely-used file compression format on Linux systems and other platforms.
Intel CPU Microcode Updates Released For Six High Severity Vulnerabilities
This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities.
DXVK 2.7 Released With Many Improvements & Better Support On Newer Intel GPUs
DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux.
New Linux Kernel Patches From Intel Delivering +18% Database Performance
In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance, separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL.
And then when it comes to the Intel Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks on Phoronix for 2025, here’s a look at all of that fun and interesting content:
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel
June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially — and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet — being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here’s a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.
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 Ryzen AI Max+ 395 With Framework Desktop vs. Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux Performance
Last week alongside our Framework Desktop review with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” SoC I posted benchmarks of the Strix Halo performance compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X / 9950X3D socketed desktop processors. For those wondering similarly how the top-end Strix Halo SoC in the Framework Desktop competes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” flagship in performance and power efficiency, here are those comparison benchmarks.
Intel Arc B570 Graphics Performance On Linux
Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we’ve been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux Performance Improving But Short Of AMD Ryzen & Intel Core Ultra
Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E “Concept” ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.
Intel Arc Pro B50 Linux Performance Benchmarks
Intel announced the Arc Pro B-Series back at Computex consisting of the Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 graphics cards. Marking availability today and the review embargo lift is for the Arc Pro B50 for workstations, which provides 16GB of RAM, 70 Watt total board power, and a $349 USD launch price for this workstation graphics card. Here are the preliminary Linux performance benchmarks and open-source driver support metrics for the Intel Arc Pro B50.
AMD EPYC Turin vs. Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids vs. Graviton4 Benchmarks With AWS M8 Instances
With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin”, for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.
Final Benchmarks Of Clear Linux On Intel: ~48% Faster Than Ubuntu Out-Of-The-Box
Last week Friday the unfortunate news came down that Intel was discontinuing their Clear Linux project effective immediately. For the past ten years Intel software engineers have been crafting Clear Linux as a high performance distribution that is extensively optimized for x86_64 processors via aggressive compiler tuning, various patches to the Linux kernel and other packages, and a variety of other optimizations throughout the operating system. For years Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too. Here is a final look at the Clear Linux performance on the Intel side compared to the performance of the latest Ubuntu 25.04 release.
21-Way Intel Core / AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop Comparison On Ubuntu 25.04
As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks. I ended up taking things a bit further after those reviews and have now extended it to a 21-way laptop comparison of AMD Ryzen and Intel Core SoCs from the past few generations in looking at their performance on Ubuntu 25.04 across more than 200 benchmarks.
The Massive AI Performance Benefit With AMX On Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids”
Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids” processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.
Here’s to hoping Panther Lake, Clearwater Forest, and their next graphics wares pan out in 2026 with competitive performance and great Linux support. What do you hope to see out of Intel as it pertains to Linux/open-source in 2026? Let us know over the holiday weekend in the forums.
