News: 0001578164

  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 "GFX1251" Target Added To LLVM As Latest RDNA 4.5 APU

([AMD] 74 Minutes Ago AMD GFX1251)


The past few months we have been intrigued by an AMD [1]GFX1250 target added to the LLVM codebase for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is RDNA4 and GFX1250 is presumably some "RDNA 4.5" / "RDNA Refresh" part akin to GFX1150 having been for the RDNA 3.5 parts with Strix Halo / Strix Point. The prior LLVM code confirmed GFX1250 is in APU form factor but product details beyond that have been scarce. Today a new AMD GFX1251 target was merged to LLVM.

AMD GFX1251 is now present in the LLVM codebase as a new sub-target similar to GFX1250. The features enabled by AMD GFX1251 are very similar to GFX1250 just as there were a number of different GFX115x variants. GFX1250 introduces a number of new instructions, [2]doubles the number of user SGPRs , and other improvements over GFX11 and GFX12.

The documentation patch confirms GFX1251 is an APU part just like GFX1250.

The AMD GFX1251 support was merged to LLVM Git today via [3]this commit . I'll keep monitoring for any more details on these unannounced revised RDNA4-based AMD APUs.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GFX1250

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX1250-32-User-SGPRs

[3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/e556dc0b232b553d7894a22603d8ee46e78fbd99


phoronix

Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster

Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one,
much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker
famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on
a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC.

"Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster
will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not
really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node
cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses."

Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built
a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing
calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s.

He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us
yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which
each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which
each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running
old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked.