The Hot Take: Race to the ST champion on next architecture has begun.
AMD's Zen 6 processors are out! Well, the EPYC 9006 family of server CPUs is out, anyway. These aren't chips that mere mortals like you and I can reasonably acquire, so there aren't really many third-party benchmarks out there yet, but somebody ran GeekBench 7 on one, and you know what that means: time for some wild speculation, such as the supposed 15% single-threaded IPC increase you might have seen reported this week. However, it isn't quite that clear yet. Well-known enthusiast and occasional leaker HXL (@9550pro) spotted the EPYC 9996ā¦
AMD has submitted a Linux overclocking driver for Ryzen processors, giving enthusiasts official tuning controls after a lengthy wait outside the Windows club.
AMD engineer Shyam Sundar S K posted the proposed AOD WMI driver, which connects Linux to platform firmware.Ā The initial patches expose Package Power Tracking, Thermal Design Current and Electrical Design Current limits through sysfs, together with their supported ranges.Ā Users can toggle simultaneous multithreading at the firmware level and read current memory clocks.
According toā¦
AMD's first Arm-based CPUs in over a decade, codenamed Soundwave, are heading to Surface laptops from Microsoft. AMD Soundwave APUs To Bring Arm's Competitive Value To Surface Laptops As Apple's Pressure Mounts on Microsoft The AMD Soundwave SoCs were first spotted back in 2024, when they were listed as a next-generation 3nm APU design. Few details were known back then, but a year later, we learned about Soundwave being AMD's attempt at the Arm ecosystem. Initially primed for a 2026 launch for Microsoft's 2026 Surface lineup, the plans changedā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | October 1, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: If true, definitely an opportunity for AMD to take the performance crown for a time.
With GPUs and memory chips in incredibly high demand, 2027 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual graphics card release cycles. NVIDIA has been dominating the segment for years, but if recent rumors suggesting that the RTX 60 series is delayed until 2028 turn out to be true, AMD could find itself in a unique position to lure users toward its upcoming cards.
The Hot Take: Snapdragon SoC's going out of support sooner than x86 chips or that just me thinking this?
The Surface lineup belonging to Microsoft largely comprises machines shipping with Snapdragon chipsets or Intel processors, with the latest addition being NVIDIAās RTX SparkĀ SoCs for the ultra-premium Surface Laptop Ultra. If youāve noticed, AMD is sorely missing from the list, even though the companyās Xbox hardware ships with these chips. Well, a company executive has provided a reason, and itās not because Microsoft has little to no love for AMD. A Microsoft executive says āwe love working with AMD,ā but itās working with a limited productā¦
The Hot Take: Will have to see how this works and if the fidelity is good.
Ā AMDĀ has shown a ray tracing trick that slashes memory and acceleration-structure costs while keeping hundreds of millions of animated triangles moving in real time.
AMD Fellow Holger Gruen demonstrated the technique using a terrain scene containing about 25,000 independently animated plants. At maximum level of detail, the vegetation represents roughly 2.8 billion triangles.
After level-of-detail selection, the system ray-traces about 500 million animated triangles each frame using primary and shadow rays. AMD says the scene runs at moreā¦
The Hot Take: As expected, while they continue to squeeze out every dollar from Ai.
Both GPU giants are expected to skip 2027 for their next-generation of graphics cards, and only one configuration is expected to see its debut next year. Leaker Claims AMD and NVIDIA Planning to Launch Their Next-Gen Graphics Cards in 2028 While RDNA 2 AT2 GPU Launches in 2027 We have previously heard reports claiming that AMD is reportedly planning to launch its next generation of graphics cards in late 2027. Some reports claimed that the launch could be delayed until early 2028. Looks like we aren't getting the complete GPU family out untilā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | September 9, 2026 | CPU, Hardware, x86
The Hot Take: Are we going to have a third player in the x86 market? Reminds me of the days Cyrix 686's back in the day if so. Would help push competition and Intel with an injection of licensing cash.
The mystery deepens around an x86 implementation from a corporate entity other than AMD and Intel and has been making some very intriguing changes for coming from a seeming start-up. Beyond 16 tile and 32 tile AMX implementations that already surpass Intel's current Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) capabilities in shipping Xeon CPUs, new disclosures were made today concerning Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED), and even x86S as the effort that Intel previously stopped for cleaning up the x86ā¦
The Hot Take: Intersting move, I haven't looked into how low level Rust gets compared to C++. Something I need to do I guess.
Phoronix reports:
AMD is building out what they are describing as an "elite" team of developers for driving Rust code "deep into the GPU stack" from firmware to drivers, shader compilers, and other GPU software in Rust. AMD Senior Fellow Harsh Meno posted this week to LinkedIn about this new effort...
And note this AMD job posting that's active for hiring a software development engineer to work on Rust code...
"We are building next-generation systems software for AMD GPUs with Rust as a core technical direction. Theā¦
By ckasprzak | TkOut | September 5, 2026 | AMD, GPU, Hardware
The Hot Take: AMD going to make a push for more than mid-range?
New leak points towards noticeably higher frequencies for AMD's next-generation graphics architecture. AMD RDNA 5 GPUs Could Target Up To 3.4 GHz Clock Speeds, Putting the Architecture up to 14% Ahead of RX 9070 XT's Boost Clock AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, RDNA 5, is still far away from the official launch, but we already have some early leaks pointing to the architecture's capabilities. As you might know, the RDNA 5 architecture is going to power AMD's next-gen graphics stack, including dedicated graphics cards and iGPUs onā¦