At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.

Last month Intel introduced their Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors with up to 128 P cores, MRDIMM support, and other improvements as a big step-up in performance and power efficiency for their server processors. The Xeon 6900P series showed they could tango with the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo processors in a number of areas, but Genoa has been around since November 2022... With today's AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" launch, Zen 5 is coming to servers and delivers stunning performance and power efficiency. The new top-end AMD EPYC Turin processor performance can obliterate the competition in most workloads and delivers a great generational leap in performance and power efficiency. Here are our first 5th Gen AMD EPYC Turin benchmarks in looking at the EPYC 9575F, EPYC 9755, and EPYC 9965 processors across many workloads and testing in both single and dual socket configurations.

In addition to announcing the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors and the latest on the AMD Instinct front, Lisa Su at the AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco also announced the AMD Pensando Salina 400 DPU and AMD Pensando Pollara 400 Ultra Ethernet AI NIC.

AMD is using their Advancing AI event today to announce 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors. With up to 192 cores / 384 threads per socket, 17% IPC uplift, AVX-512 with a full 512-bit data path, and the Zen 5 architectural improvements, these new EPYC 9005 processors deliver a significant generational improvement over the EPYC 9004 Genoa and Bergamo processors.

Complementing the AMD EPYC 9575F / 9755 / 9965 performance benchmarks article looking at those Turin processors up against prior AMD EPYC CPUs and the Intel Xeon competition, this article is looking squarely at the 192-core EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" processor compared to Ampere Computing's AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor. It's an x86_64 vs. AArch64 battle at the leading 192 core count for performance and CPU power efficiency.

As part of a busy day in the CPU world, Intel has lifted the embargo on the Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake" desktop processors. This isn't the review embargo but just an overview on this new generation succeeding 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" on the desktop.

Alyssa Rosenzweig provided an update today at the XDC 2024 conference in Montreal on the open-source "Honeykrisp" Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs within Mesa and related work as part of the Asahi Linux project to provide for a nice Linux gaming experience atop the ARM-based Apple devices.

The Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" ISOs are now officially available as the newest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux.

While Intel Xe2 graphics have just debuted with Lunar Lake and we are awaiting Battlemage discrete GPUs with Xe2, Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers have begun work enabling Xe3 graphics! Xe3 driver work is now underway for next-generation Intel graphics.

AMD today quietly posted a new open-source Linux kernel driver for review... the AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver. This AMD 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer Driver for Linux is intended to help optimize performance on systems sporting 3D V-Cache such as the AMD Ryzen "X3D" parts and the EPYC "X" processors.

For those making use of Restartable Sequences (RSEQ) on Linux systems, there is an enticing performance optimization on the way.

The Open 3D Engine as the open-source game engine developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella and began as an advanced version of the Amazon Lumberyard engine is out with a new feature release. Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 24.09 is out today with a variety of enhancements for this cross-platform game engine.

While not a long-term support release, Ubuntu Server 24.10 is delivering an interesting proof-of-concept for supporting NVMe/TCP based installations.

Slipping under my radar until now was the Vulkan API 1.3.297 spec update released last week that introduces a new extension, VK_EXT_present_mode_fifo_latest_ready.

Following my recent Intel Core Ultra 7 200V "Lunar Lake" Linux benchmarks and looking at the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics (including Windows 11 vs. Linux already), you may be wondering about the Lunar Lake CPU performance between Windows and Linux... Here are some benchmarks of the ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24.10 Linux.

Microsoft Linux engineers have continued preparing the Linux kernel to support Hyper-V Dom0 for Linux to run as the root partition.

Originally published last summer were patches from Intel for the Linux kernel to introduce a PCI Express bandwidth controller Linux driver to provide a PCIe cooling mechanism via bandwidth reduction to devices in order to prevent thermal issues. One year later this driver continues to be worked on and today brought the eighth iteration of these patches.

The long-in-development GNOME triple buffering support that is patched into the Ubuntu and Debian builds and available for years in patch form might need to undergo a redesign. That's to better accommodate the NVIDIA Linux driver and likely help other non-Mesa graphics drivers too.

The GCC 14 compiler marked Itanium IA-64 support as obsolete with plans to remove that Intel architecture in GCC 15. But for now at least the Itanium Linux compiler support has seen some reprieve with it being un-deprecated.

While the Linux 6.12 merge window has been closed for more than one week, the modern NTFS "NTFS3" driver has seen some late feature enhancements as well as some fixes merged today for this new kernel version.