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  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" Enjoys Great Performance Gains With Latest Linux Software

([Operating Systems] 76 Minutes Ago 3 Comments)


With the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out in three weeks, I have been re-testing a number of different devices on this newest Ubuntu release. One of the most significant improvements to note was when running the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" and quantifying the performance gains of the Radeon 8060S Graphics since launch last year. Here's a look at how the Vulkan and OpenGL performance has evolved for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 since its launch last year in going from Ubuntu 26.04 to Ubuntu 26.04.

[1]

This round of testing is looking at the performance of the Framework Desktop with Ryzen AI Max+ 395 back when I ran my original benchmarks on it in July in preparation for the review embargo lift in early August. That initial testing was done on Ubuntu 25.04 as the stable release of the time and featured packages like the Linux 6.14 kernel and Mesa 25.0.7 graphics drivers and GNOME 48 desktop.

Now in moving to Ubuntu 26.04 is the Linux 7.0 kernel, Mesa 26.0 graphics drivers, GNOME 50 desktop, and other up-to-date software packages.

The same Framework Desktop was used for all this testing with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo", 64GB of LPDDR5-8000 memory, Radeon 8060S integrated graphics, and 2TB WD_BLACK SN700 NVMe SSD.

This is quite a straight-forward look at how the AMDGPU performance with RADV Vulkan driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver have evolved since the Framework Desktop launched last year, using the same tests/versions as then with that original testing. Let's see these fascinating performance gains. With having had to return the HP ZBook Ultra G1a review unit some months ago, the Framework Desktop remains my main Strix Halo device for ongoing Linux testing at Phoronix - thanks Framework Computer!



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=ubuntu-2604-strix-halo&image=ubuntu_2604_strix_lrg


Brief History Of Linux (#25)

By the mid-1990's the Linux community was burgeoning as countless geeks
fled Redmond monopolistic oppression, Armonk cluelessness, and Cupertino
click-and-drool reality distortion fields. By late 1991 there was an
informal Linux User Group in Finland, although its primary focus was Linux
advocacy, not drinking beer and telling Microsoft jokes as most do today.

Kernel development continued at a steady clip, with more and more people
joining in and hoping that their patches would be accepted by the
Benevolent Dictator himself. To have a patch accepted by Linus was like
winning the Nobel Prize, but to face rejection was like being rejected
from Clown College. The reputation game certainly sparked some flame wars.

One of the most memorable crisis was over the behavior of the delete and
backspace keys. A certain faction of hackers wanted the Backspace key to
actually backspace and the Delete key to actually delete. Linus wasn't too
keen on the proposed changes; "It Works For Me(tm)" is all he said. Some
observers now think Linus was pulling rank to get back at the unknown
hacker who managed to slip a patch by him that replaced the "Kernel panic"
error with "Kernel panic: Linus probably fscked it all up again".