The AMD BC-250 as the product designed at the time for cryptocurrency mining and based on a cut-down Sony PlayStation 5 APU continues having an interesting second-life being re-tasked for Linux use from general purpose workloads to AI. Sent out this weekend were the latest Linux kernel patches for continuing to enable more of the BC-250.

The AMD BC-250 continues to be interesting to hobbyists for those that happen to have this originally crypto-mining designed board or find it in the used part. The BC-250 as a reminder has six Zen 2 cores, a 24 CU RDNA2 GPU, and 16GB of GDDR6 video memory.

Thanks to the open-source ecosystem the AMD BC-250 works on Linux with patches having brought [1]RADV driver patches , adapting the AMDGPU driver for it, [2]sensor monitoring , and [3]other functionality for this repurposed hardware .

Last year it was possible to find the AMD BC-250 used for around $100 USD as an interesting option for hobbyists. But with the wild PC component pricing these days, used BC-250 boards are fetching $200~350 USD as of writing.

The latest work to report on now for Linux on the AMD BC-250 were a set of three patches posted this weekend for bringing up the AMD PSP Secure Processor. A few chances to the AMD Crypto Co-Processor (CCP) Linux driver are needed for getting the AMD BC-250's secure processor now working for encryption tasks.

[4]This patch series has the AMD CCP enablement for the BC-250.

Those wanting to learn more about running Linux on the AMD BC-250 for different workloads can see [5]this GitHub guide for a lot of documentation on the topic.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-RADV-PS5-BC-250

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.15-HWMON

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-rc6-x86-urgent

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/178984289056.12336.17662860552012704364@mtsistemi.it/

[5] https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/#quick-start-checklist