Following the recent patch work for enabling the Intel 5th Gen NPU premiering with Panther Lake, a new patch series posted today brings a number of improvements for this Intel neural processing unit driver -- including the ability to handle larger workloads.

Continuing on with the testing around the AMD EPYC 9005 series "Turin" processors, today is a look at the Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) performance impact for Turin while using the AMD EPYC 9755 as the highest-end "Turin Classic" processor with 128 cores / 256 threads. Similar SMT on/off tests for "Turin Dense" with the EPYC 9965 192-core / 384-thread will also be coming in a future benchmarking comparison on Phoronix. These tests are mainly intended for reference purposes for those curious about the SMT benefits at such high core counts and what workloads may or may not still benefit from SMT especially when having so many threads while using 12-channel DDR5-6000 memory.

PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library.

Following a proposal that began last month, Red Hat engineer Nikita Popov was nominated to become the new lead maintainer for LLVM. Following unaminous approval, as of last week in LLVM Git he's been appointed the official lead maintainer for this critical open-source compiler stack.

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Last week at XDC 2024 in Montreal was a status update on AMD's GPU compute virtualization support around their open-source Linux GPU driver and ROCm compute stack.

Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented in Montreal last week at the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2024) on the current state of Rusticl as the Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers within Mesa.

OGRE-Next 3.0 has debuted this week as the newest version of the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine Next Generation for serving as an open-source 3D graphics rendering engine.

Following last week's release of the LLVM/Clang-downstream AOCC 5.0 for optimized compiler support extended to Zen 5 CPUs, the GPU side of the house at AMD this week released AOMP 20.0-0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on GPU device offloading.

Qualcomm engineers have developed VCL as a new open-source OpenCL driver for use with VirtIO-GPU for providing OpenCL hardware acceleration within virtual machines.

Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11.

For those that have been eager to see more Intel Core Ultra Series 200V Lunar Lake Linux testing, here is the latest installment of testing as well as an update from Intel following my Lunar Lake Linux testing recent reports. Today's article is looking at Intel Lunar Lake versus AMD Strix Point across different ACPI Platform Profile configurations for whether you are after peak performance or the most power savings.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Red Hat has announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI 1.2. RHEL AI was announced earlier this year as Red Hat's AI solution for a foundation model platform to develop / test / run Granite GenAI models. Not to be confused with the RHEL operating system itself, RHEL AI is all about building large language models for enterprise software with Granite LLMs and InstructLab tooling.

It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

The open-source Intel Low Power Mode Daemon (LPMD) software is out with a new release for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core systems under Linux. The Intel LPMD daemon is able to configure the system depending upon workload, utilization, and other hints for delivering the most power efficient cores and behavior of the processor.

A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files.

Microsoft has released Azure Linux 3.0.20241005 as the "October 2024" update to the company's in-house Linux distribution.

ISPC 1.25 has been released as the newest feature update to the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as the C language variant for "single program, multiple data" programming to target both Intel's CPUs and GPUs.

It was just last week that Python 3.13 saw its official release with many great features from a new interactive interpreter to an experimental JIT and removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental free-threaded build mode. Python 3.14 Alpha 1 is already out today in the first very early stage development milestone toward next year's big Python update.