Last week I published fresh benchmarks showing how AMD's EPYC 4005 series for budget servers can outperform the original EPYC 7601 flagship processor when EPYC first launched during the Zen 1 period. Even with lower core counts and fewer memory channels, the modern EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors were able to outpace that original EPYC "Naples" flagship processor from 2017. With carrying out the fresh re-testing of the AMD EPYC 7601 on a modern 2025 Linux software stack, in today's article is a look at how the EPYC 7601 Zen 1 performance compares to the EPYC 9005 "Turin" series with today's flagship EPYC 9755 and EPYC 9965 processors.

Red Hat this morning went public with RHEL for Business Developers, an expansion of their RHEL Developer Program to make it easier for business developers to make use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no-cost for their development efforts...

Miracle-WM 0.6 is out today as a mega release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor by Canonical/Ubuntu developer Matthew Kosarek. Miracle-WM provides tiling window manager support inspired by i3 and Sway while being one of the most pronounced users of the Mir code...

Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state...

The Mesa 25.2 code is expected to be branched next week to kick off the release process for this quarter's iteration of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. As such, there's going to be a mad dash over the next week to land lingering features and other improvements for Mesa 25.2. Making it into Mesa Git today was a big set of 42 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver...

Google yesterday lifted the lid on their work around Skia "Graphite" as a new rasterization back-end designed for modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and supporting multi-threading by default. Skia Graphite aims to deliver much better performance within the Chrome/Chromium web browser...

Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20250702 on Tuesday as the newest monthly update to this in-house Linux distribution used throughout the company and by external parties...

The first alpha release of PHP 8.5 was issued last week in kicking off the release cycle in working toward the official PHP 8.5.0 release later in the year...

Just over one year after the Amarok 3.0 release after a six year hiatus that brought it to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5, Amarok 3.3 is out today as the first version taking it to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6...

Here's an unexpected company match... GlobalFoundries announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS. Yes, the company formerly part of Wave Computing and before that Imagination and Silicon Graphics during its long history. MIPS in recent years hasn't been focused on its namesake CPU architecture but rather RISC-V core designs...

Made public minutes ago is Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) as a new class of class of speculative side channel attacks affecting AMD processors...

Last month the Framework Laptop 12 began shipping as an upgrade-friendly, convertible 2-in-1 laptop that is friendly with Linux as we've come to expect out of Framework Computer devices. The launch-day Linux testing at Phoronix of the Framework 12 was done out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux with the defaults on it and the other comparison laptops tested. But as we've shown with recent Intel and AMD laptops, ACPI Platform Profile adjustments can make a significant impact on bettering the performance or extending battery life with more power efficient operation. For those wondering about the impact of the platform profiles on Framework Laptop 12, here are some power and performance benchmarks.

Following all of the Linux and broader open-source software enablement around Power11 the past three or so years, IBM today formally announced their new Power11 hardware...

The AMD Hardware Feedback Driver has been queued up via a TIP branch for expected merging during the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. This new open-source AMD driver is designed to help make the kernel's scheduler make better decisions around task placement for heterogeneous processor designs with a mix of the "classic" and "dense" cores...

In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts...

The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon "YTK" as its own localized fork of this toolkit...

Interestingly a batch of new AMD GPU firmware files were upstreamed to linux-firmware.git yesterday in preparing for the next AMD product launch of hardware featuring RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics...

FEX 2507 is now available for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 games and applications atop 64-bit ARM Linux devices whether they be AArch64 servers or ARM64 single board computers and other devices...

OBS Studio 31.1 is now available for those using this cross-platform free software for screencasting and other screen recording purposes. OBS Studio 31.1 is another great step forward for this open-source software that has a devoted following and user-base across Windows, macOS, and Linux...

U-Boot 2025.07 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source boot loader that is widely-used among embedded devices across different CPU architectures...

The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook...

One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule. Meanwhile their EPYC 9005 "Turin" proof-of-concept code was recently published...

Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed...

The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September...