News: 0001580546

  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)

Mesa 25.3 Intel Driver Lands Support For Stochastic Rounding

([Intel] 6 Hours Ago Stochastic Rounding)


A new feature merged this week for the Intel Mesa compiler code for their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers is support for Stochastic Rounding.

Stochastic Rounding "SRND" is now wired up for the Intel compiler code within Mesa 25.3. The SRND opcode appears to work with upcoming Intel Xe3 graphics hardware.

Stochastic Rounding can help with the accuracy of low-precision numerical computations and is a win for machine learning (AI/ML) and similar fields with low-precision arithmetic.

The SRND opcode and related Intel compiler handling is merged via [1]this MR ahead of Mesa 25.3 stable due out in November.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/36529


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Invasion of the Dancing Penguin

Those annoying, dancing cartoon characters embedded in software applications
are no longer confined to Microsoft programs. They have entered the realm
of Linux. A new Linux distribution under development, called LinTux,
promises to provide a more "user-friendly" environment through its "Dancing
Penguin" assistant.

Dancing Tux will "guide" users through the installation process and will be
a permanent fixture of the X root window. The LinTux staff demonstrated a
prototype version of the Dancing Tux program to this Humorix reporter. It
was certainly impressive, but, like the Dancing Paper Clip in Microsoft
Office, it becomes annoying very fast.

The one redeeming feature of LinTux is that, when the system is idle,
Dancing Tux becomes a make-shift screen saver. The animations included in
the prototype were quite amusing. For instance, in one scene, Tux chases
Bill Gates through an Antarctic backdrop. In another animation, Tux can be
seen drinking beers with his penguin pals and telling Microsoft jokes.