AMD recently allowed me some time with their AMD Accelerator Cloud (AAC) leveraging multiple Instinct MI300X accelerators. During this brief opportunity to try out their latest software advancements with the Instinct MI300X and the ROCm compute stack, one of the most striking takeaways was their documentation improvements compared to previous forays into ROCm+Instinct compute. In addition, AMD is now offering more robust container options for easier Instinct compute deployments with more software options available and being more regularly updated.

Patches queued up this month into net-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel merge window add support for the Airoha NPU... Not to be confused with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is all the rage these days for helping with AI, the Airoha NPU is a Network Processor Unit.

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!

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been working on some optimizations to the DRM synchronization object "drm_syncobj" code for slightly more efficient use on the CPU side.

In addition to NVIDIA's GTC conference going on right now, they also released today an updated R570 Linux driver build.

Following Hector Martin stepping down from the Asahi Linux project that he founded for bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, Asahi Lina announced today that she is pausing work on all of the Apple GPU driver development she had been pursuing for Asahi Linux with the open-source DRM kernel driver as well as Mesa contributions.

Ubuntu developers decided a few months back to switch from IRC to Matrix for real-time communication needs. The newest fundamental shift being discussed by Ubuntu developers is shifting from mailing list discussions to Ubuntu Discourse for mailing list like written communications.

BLAKE3 as the cryptographic hashing function that is much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA-1 while being more secure than SHA-1 and MD5 is out with a new feature update. BLAKE3 v1.7 is now available for the official C and Rust code as the reference implementations to this cryptographic hash function.

The full PCI Express 7.0 specification remains on track for publishing later this year while out today is version 0.9 of the specification as the planned final draft.

Blender 4.4 is out today as the newest version of this incredible, open-source 3D modeling software.

Along with the GraalVM 24 update today, Oracle has formally released OpenJDK Java 24. JDK 24 is now out under general availability status with many new features and changes.

The beta of Fedora Linux 42 is out this morning with countless improvements over the prior release. There is the near-final GNOME 48 desktop packages and a whole host of other software updates for living on the leading-edge of open-source software as well as boasting a number of new innovations that were made by Red Hat engineers.

Ahead of the OpenJDK Java 24 release expected in the coming hours today, Oracle already released "GraalVM for JDK 24 Community 24.0" edition.

Hopefully leading to more timely updates to the Zstd compression code within the Linux kernel is a decision to add on a co-maintainer of the in-kernel Zstandard code.

If you happen to have a rare ARM64 platform with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) support, with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel there is set to finally be run-time SMT controls similar to the functionality long available on x86/x86_64 processors.

Theora is Xiph.Org's first released video codec designed for use with Ogg. Theora started out based on the VP3 codec. It's been over 16 years since the release of the libtheora 1.0 reference software implementation and tagged this week was libtheora 1.2 beta.

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.

A pull request was opened last week for adding web browser dark mode support for Nginx error pages. Unfortunate for those who prefer browsing in dark mode and then shocked when hitting Nginx-served 404 error pages or similar, the change has been rejected.

Some 145 patches for the Rust "gccrs" front-end were posted today and subsequently merged to GCC Git ahead of the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release.

Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn't seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.