An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its performance, increasing to as much as 100x with software tweaks. If it works, it could help the industry keep up with the insatiable compute demand of AI makers. Flow is a spinout of VTT, a Finland state-backed research organization that's a bit like a national lab. The chip technology it's commercializing, which it has branded the Parallel Processing Unit, is the result of research performed at that lab (though VTT is an investor, the IP is owned by Flow). The claim, Flow is first to admit, is laughable on its face. You can't just magically squeeze extra performance out of CPUs across architectures and code bases. If so, Intel or AMD or whoever would have done it years ago. But Flow has been working on something that has been theoretically possible -- it's just that no one has been able to pull it off.

Central Processing Units have come a long way since the early days of vacuum tubes and punch cards, but in some fundamental ways they're still the same. Their primary limitation is that as serial rather than parallel processors, they can only do one thing at a time. Of course, they switch that thing a billion times a second across multiple cores and pathways -- but these are all ways of accommodating the single-lane nature of the CPU. (A GPU, in contrast, does many related calculations at once but is specialized in certain operations.) "The CPU is the weakest link in computing," said Flow co-founder and CEO Timo Valtonen. "It's not up to its task, and this will need to change."

CPUs have gotten very fast, but even with nanosecond-level responsiveness, there's a tremendous amount of waste in how instructions are carried out simply because of the basic limitation that one task needs to finish before the next one starts. (I'm simplifying here, not being a chip engineer myself.) What Flow claims to have done is remove this limitation, turning the CPU from a one-lane street into a multi-lane highway. The CPU is still limited to doing one task at a time, but Flow's Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), as they call it, essentially performs nanosecond-scale traffic management on-die to move tasks into and out of the processor faster than has previously been possible. [...] Flow is just now emerging from stealth, with [about $4.3 million] in pre-seed funding led by Butterfly Ventures, with participation from FOV Ventures, Sarsia, Stephen Industries, Superhero Capital and Business Finland. The primary challenge Flow faces is that for its technology to be integrated, it requires collaboration at the chip-design level. This means chipmakers need to redesign their products to include the PPU, which is a substantial investment.

Given the industry's cautious nature and the existing roadmaps of major chip manufacturers, the uptake of this new technology might be slow. Companies are often reluctant to adopt unproven technologies that could disrupt their long-term plans.

The white paper can be read here. A Flow Computing FAQ is also available here.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Covered last week on Phoronix was a new patch from Intel that with tuning to the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver was showing big wins for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" performance and power efficiency. I was curious with the Intel claims posted for a couple benchmarks and thus over the weekend set out to run many Intel Meteor Lake benchmarks on this one-line kernel patch... The results are great for boosting the Linux performance of Intel Core ultra laptops with as much as 72% better performance. [...]

When looking at the CPU power consumption overall, for the wide variety of workloads tested it was just a slight uptick in power use and thus overall leading to slightly better power efficiency too. See all the data here. So this is quite a nice one-line Linux kernel patch for Meteor Lake and will hopefully be mainlined to the Linux kernel for Linux 6.11 if not squeezing it in as a "fix" for the current Linux 6.10 cycle. It's just too bad though that it took six months after launch for this tuned EPP value to be determined. Fresh benchmarks between Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen on the latest Linux software will be coming up soon on Phoronix.

As reported by Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia now holds 88% of the GPU market after its market share jumped 8% in its most recent quarter. "This jump shaves 7% off of AMD's share, putting it down to 19% total," reports XDA Developers. "And if you're wondering where that extra 1% went, it came from all of Intel's market share, squashing it down to 0%." From the report: Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, mentions how the GPU market hasn't really looked "normal" since the 2007 recession. Ever since then, everything from the crypto boom to COVID has messed with the usual patterns. Usually, the first quarter of a year shows a bit of a dip in GPU sales, but because of AI's influence, it may seem like that previous norm may be forever gone: "Therefore, one would expect Q2'24, a traditional quarter, to also be down. But, all the vendors are predicting a growth quarter, mostly driven by AI training systems in hyperscalers. Whereas AI trainers use a GPU, the demand for them can steal parts from the gaming segment. So, for Q2, we expect to see a flat to low gaming AIB result and another increase in AI trainer GPU shipments. The new normality is no normality."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel's fastest processors have included hyperthreading, a technique that lets more than one thread run on a single CPU core, for over 20 years -- and it's used by AMD (which calls it "simultaneous multi-threading") as well. But you won't see a little "HT" on the Intel sticker for any Lunar Lake laptops, because none of them use it. Hyperthreading will be disabled on all Lunar Lake CPU cores, including both performance and efficiency cores. Why? The reason is complicated, but basically it's no longer needed. The performance cores or P-Cores on the new Lunar Lake series are 14 percent faster than the same cores on the previous-gen Meteor Lake CPUs, even with the multi-thread-processing of hyperthreading disabled.

Turning on the feature would come at too high a power cost, and Lunar Lake is all about boosting performance while keeping laptops in this generation thin, light, and long-lasting. That means maximizing single-thread performance -- the most relevant to users who are typically focusing on one task at a time, as is often the case for laptops -- in terms of surface area, to improve overall performance per watt. Getting rid of the physical components necessary for hyperthreading just makes sense in that context.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Chinese research team says it has uncovered a significant security flaw in processor design that could have a wide impact on China's booming domestic chip industry. China was relying on the structure of the world's largest open-source CPU architecture to build their own CPUs and bypass the US chip ban, and was paying attention to any weaknesses, they said. The issue was found in RISC-V, an open-source standard used in advanced chips and semiconductors. Compared with mainstream CPU structures -- such as X86 used by Intel and AMD --RISC-V offers free access and can be modified without restriction.

The flaw allows attackers to bypass the security protections of modern processors and operating systems without administrative rights, leading to the potential theft of protected sensitive information and breaches of personal privacy. The vulnerability was confirmed by the team of Professor Hu Wei at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), a major defence research institute in Shaanxi province. The researchers are experienced in hardware design security, vulnerability detection and cryptographic application safety. It was first reported by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Centre of China (CNCERT) on April 24, and NPU gave further details in an official announcement on May 24.

Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger took the stage at the Computex show in Taiwan to talk about new products he expects will help turn back the tide of share losses to peers, including AI leader Nvidia. From a report: Intel showed its new Xeon 6 data center processors with more efficient cores that will allow operators to cut down the space required for a given task to a third of prior-generation hardware. Like rivals, from Advanced Micro Devices to Qualcomm, Intel touted benchmarks that showed its new silicon is significantly better than its existing options. AMD and Qualcomm's CEOs, in earlier Computex keynotes, used Intel's laptop and desktop processors to show how far ahead they are in certain aspects of technology.

Gelsinger took a direct shot at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's claim that traditional processors like Intel's are running out of steam in the age of artificial intelligence. "Unlike what Jensen would have you believe, Moore's Law is alive and well," he said, stressing that Intel will have a major role to play in the proliferation of AI as the leading provider of PC chips. "I think of it like the internet 25 years ago, it's that big," Gelsinger said. "We see this as the fuel that's driving the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade."

AMD is reverting to a simpler, more traditional numbering scheme for its laptop processors, abandoning its recent complex "decoder ring" system. The new system for Ryzen AI laptop processors will use a three-digit model number to denote generation and SKU, aligning more closely with industry norms. Ars Technica reports: For its new Ryzen AI laptop processors, codenamed "Strix Point," AMD is still using the same broad Ryzen 3/5/7/9 number to communicate general performance level plus a one- or two-letter suffix to denote general performance and power level (U for ultraportables, HX for higher-performance chips, and so on). A new three-digit processor number will inform buyers of the chip's generation in the first digit and denote the specific SKU using the last two digits. In other words, the company is essentially hitting the undo button.

Like Intel, AMD is shifting from four-digit numbers to three digits. The Strix Point processor numbers will start with the 300 series, which AMD says is because this is the third generation of Ryzen laptop processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Current 7040-series and 8040-series processors with NPUs are not being renamed retroactively, and AMD plans to stop using the 7000- and 8000-series numbering for processor introductions going forward. AMD wouldn't describe exactly how it would approach CPU model numbers for new products that used older architectures but did say that new processors that didn't meet the 40+ TOPS requirement for Microsoft's Copilot+ program would simply use the "Ryzen" name instead of the new "Ryzen AI" branding. That would include older architectures with slower NPUs, like the current 7040 and 8040-series chips.

Desktop CPUs are, once again, totally unaffected by this change. Desktop processors' four-digit model numbers and alphabetic suffixes generally tell you all you need to know about their underlying architecture; the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and the Zen 5 architecture were also announced today. It seems like a lot of work to do to end up basically where we started, especially when the people at AMD who make and market the desktop chips have been getting by just fine with older model numbers for newly released products when appropriate. But to be fair to AMD, there just isn't a great way to do processor model numbers in a simple and consistent way, at least not given current market realities [...].

The highlight of AMD's presentation Sunday at Computex 2024 was "the introduction of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors for laptops and the Ryzen 9000 Series for desktops," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (sharing his report at Beta News): AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors, designed for next-generation AI laptops, come with AMD's latest XDNA 2 architecture. This includes a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that delivers 50 TOPS of AI processing power, significantly enhancing the AI capabilities of laptops. Among the processors announced were the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which features 12 cores and 24 threads with a boost frequency of 5.1 GHz, and the Ryzen AI 9 365 with 10 cores and 20 threads, boosting up to 5.0 GHz...

In the desktop segment, the Ryzen 9000 Series processors, based on the "Zen 5" architecture, demonstrated an average 16% improvement in IPC performance over their predecessors built on the "Zen 4" architecture. The Ryzen 9 9950X stands out with 16 cores and 32 threads, reaching up to 5.7 GHz boost frequency and equipped with 80MB of cache... AMD also reaffirmed its commitment to the AM4 platform by introducing the Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT processors. These models are compatible with existing AM4 motherboards, providing an economical upgrade path for users.
The article adds that AMD also unveiled its Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot workstation graphics card — priced at $3,499 — "further broadening its impact on high-performance computing...

"AMD also emphasized its strategic partnerships with leading OEMs such as Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, who are set to launch systems powered by these new AMD processors." And there's also a software collaboration with Microsoft, reportedly "to enhance the capabilities of AI PCs, thus underscoring AMD's holistic approach to integrating AI into everyday computing."

Last than two weeks after it was announced, "Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft's flagship AI-powered Recall feature to run on unsupported hardware," reports The Verge. From the report: Recall leverages local AI models on new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of anything you've done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scrub through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft positioned Recall as needing the very latest neural processing units (NPU) on new PCs, but you can actually get it running on older Arm-powered hardware.

Windows watcher Albacore has created a tool called Amperage, which enables Recall on devices that have an older Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, Microsoft's SQ processors, or an Ampere chipset. You need to have the latest Windows 11 24H2 update installed on one of these Windows on Arm devices, and then the tool will unlock and enable Recall. [...] You can technically unlock Recall on x86 devices, but the app won't do much until Microsoft publishes the x64 AI components required to get it up and running. Rumors suggest both AMD and Intel are close to announcing Copilot Plus PCs, so Microsoft's AI components for those machines may well appear soon. I managed to get Recall running on an x64 Windows 11 virtual machine earlier today just to test out the initial first-run experience.

Framework, a company known for its modular laptops, has announced a fourth round of iterative updates and upgrade options for its Framework Laptop 13. The upgrades include motherboards and pre-built laptops featuring new Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors with Intel Arc dedicated GPUs, lower prices for AMD Ryzen 7000 and 13th-gen Intel editions, and a new display with a higher resolution and refresh rate.

The Core Ultra boards come with three CPU options, with prices starting at $899 for a pre-built or DIY model. Upgrading from an older Intel Framework board requires an upgrade to DDR5 RAM, and Framework charges $40 for every 8GB of DDR5-5600, which is above market rates. The new 13.5-inch display has a resolution of 2880x1920, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and costs $130 more than the standard display.

This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."

It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are:

- Spack: the HPC package manager.

- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.

- Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.

- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers.

- Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem.

- E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages.

As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software.

The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit."

The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Josh Norem reports via ExtremeTech: At the recent International supercomputing conference called ISC 2024, Intel's newest Aurora supercomputer installed at Argonne National Laboratory raised a few eyebrows by finally surpassing the exascale barrier. Before this, only AMD's Frontier system had been able to achieve this level of performance. Intel also achieved what it says is the world's best performance for AI at 10.61 "AI exaflops." Intel reported the news on its blog, stating Aurora was now officially the fastest supercomputer for AI in the world. It shares the distinction in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which both built and houses the system in its current state, which Intel says was at 87% functionality for the recent tests. In the all-important Linpack (HPL) test, the Aurora computer hit 1.012 exaflops, meaning it has almost doubled the performance on tap since its initial "partial run" in late 2023, where it hit just 585.34 petaflops. The company then said it expected to cross the exascale barrier with Aurora eventually, and now it has.

Intel says for the ISC 2024 tests, Aurora was operating with 9,234 nodes. The company notes it ranked second overall in LINPACK, meaning it's still unable to dethrone AMD's Frontier system, which is also an HPE supercomputer. AMD's Frontier was the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier in June 2022. Frontier sits at around 1.2 exaflops in Linpack, so Intel is knocking on its door but still has a way to go before it can topple it. However, Intel says Aurora came in first in the Linpack-mixed benchmark, reportedly highlighting its unparalleled AI performance. Intel's Aurora supercomputer uses the company's latest CPU and GPU hardware, with 21,248 Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs and 63,744 Ponte Vecchio GPUs. When it's fully operational later this year, Intel believes the system will eventually be capable of crossing the 2-exaflop barrier.

"6.9 is now out," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux kernel mailing list, "and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)."

Phoronix writes that Linux 6.9 "has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version." And Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux: Highlights of Linux kernel 6.9 include Rust support on AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, support for the Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism for improved low-level event delivery, support for AMD SNP (Secure Nested Paging) guests, and a new dm-vdo (virtual data optimizer) target in device mapper for inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, and thin provisioning.

Linux kernel 6.9 also supports the Named Address Spaces feature in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) that allows the compiler to better optimize per-CPU data access, adds initial support for FUSE passthrough to allow the kernel to serve files from a user-space FUSE server directly, adds support for the Energy Model to be updated dynamically at run time, and introduces a new LPA2 mode for ARM 64-bit processors...

Linux kernel 6.9 will be a short-lived branch supported for only a couple of months. It will be succeeded by Linux kernel 6.10, whose merge window has now been officially opened by Linus Torvalds. Linux kernel 6.10 is expected to be released in mid or late September 2024.
"Rust language has been updated to version 1.76.0 in Linux 6.9," according to the article. And Linus Torvalds shared one more details on the Linux kernel mailing list.

"I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis...

The new interface is under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq/amd_pstate_boost_cpb for each CPU core. Thus users can tune whether particular CPU cores are boosted above the base frequency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a major shake-up of its chip roadmap, Apple has announced a new M4 processor for today's iPad Pro refresh, barely six months after releasing the first MacBook Pros with the M3 and not even two months after updating the MacBook Air with the M3. Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.

As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple's equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware. Apple's chips since 2017 have included some version of the Neural Engine, though to date, those have mostly been used to enhance and categorize photos, perform optical character recognition, enable offline dictation, and do other oddities. But it may be that Apple needs something faster for the kinds of on-device large language model-backed generative AI that it's expected to introduce in iOS and iPadOS 18 at WWDC next month. A separate report from the Wall Street Journal says Apple is developing a custom chip to run AI software in datacenters. "Apple's server chip will likely be focused on running AI models, also known as inference, rather than in training AI models, where Nvidia is dominant," reports Reuters.

Further reading: Apple Quietly Kills the Old-school iPad and Its Headphone Jack

"Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry," writes CNBC. But now "it's struggling to stay relevant." Intel's long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings. Investors pushed the shares down 9% on Friday to their lowest level of the year. Although Intel's revenue is no longer shrinking and the company remains the biggest maker of processors that power PCs and laptops, sales in the first quarter trailed estimates. Intel also gave a soft forecast for the second quarter, suggesting weak demand... Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%.

Meanwhile, the two best-performing stocks in the index are chipmaker Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, which has been boosted by surging demand for Nvidia-based artificial intelligence servers. Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now one-sixteenth the size of Nvidia by market cap. It's also smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD. For decades, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world by sales, but suffered seven straight quarters of revenue declines recently, and was passed by Nvidia last year.
Intel's problems "are decades in the making," according to CNBC, suggesting that one turning point was Apple's decision not to use Intel's chips in its iPhone. Now nearly every smartphone built uses Arm chips built by Apple and Qualcomm, while Apple's huge orders for TSMC chips "provided the cash to annually upgrade the manufacturing equipment at TSMC, which eventually surpassed Intel." Around 2017, mobile chips from Apple and Qualcomm started adding AI parts to their chips called neural processing units, another advancement over Intel's PC processors. The first Intel-based laptop with an NPU shipped late last year.

Intel has since lost share in its core PC chip business to chips that grew out of the mobile revolution... Apple stopped using Intel in its PCs in 2020. Macs now use Arm-based chips, and some of the first mainstream Windows laptops with Arm-based chips are coming out later this year. Low-cost laptops running Google ChromeOS are increasingly using Arm, too...

AMD made over 20% of server CPUs sold in 2022, and shipments grew 62% that year, according to an estimate from Counterpoint Research last year. AMD surpassed Intel's market cap the same year.

prisoninmate writes: Fedora Linux 40 distribution has been officially released -- powered by the latest Linux 6.8 kernel series, and featuring the GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6 desktop environments, reports 9to5Linux:

"Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 40 release ships with the GNOME 46 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition and the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Spin, which defaults to the Wayland session as the X11 session was completely removed."

"Fedora Linux 40 also includes some interesting package management changes, such as dropping Delta RPMs and disabling support in the default configuration of DNF / DNF5. It also changes the DNF behavior to no longer download filelists by default. However, this release doesn't ship with the long-awaited DNF5 package manager. For AMD GPUs, Fedora Linux 40 ships with AMD ROCm 6.0 as the latest release of AMD's software optimized for AI and HPC workload performance, which enables support for the newest flagship AMD Instinct MI300A and MI300X datacenter GPUs."

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation. The Framework 16 review unit as a reminder was configured with the 8-core / 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 SoC with Radeon RX 7700S graphics, a 512GB SN810 NVMe SSD, MediaTek MT7922 WiFi, and a 2560 x 1600 display.

In the few months of testing out the Framework 16 predominantly under Linux it's been working out very well. With also having a Windows 11 partition as shipped by Framework, after updating that install it made for an interesting comparison against the Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04 performance. The same Framework 16 AMD laptop was used throughout all of the testing for looking at the out-of-the-box performance across Microsoft Windows 11, Ubuntu 23.10, and the near-final state of Ubuntu 24.04. [...]

Out of 101 benchmarks carried out on all three operating systems with the Framework 16 laptop, Ubuntu 24.04 was the fastest in 67% of those tests, the prior Ubuntu 23.10 led in 22% (typically with slim margins to 24.04), and then Microsoft Windows 11 was the front-runner just 10% of the time... If taking the geomean of all 101 benchmark results, Ubuntu 23.10 was 16% faster than Microsoft Windows 11 while Ubuntu 24.04 enhanced the Ubuntu Linux performance by 3% to yield a 20% advantage over Windows 11 on this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS laptop. Ubuntu 24.04 is looking very good in the performance department and will see its stable release next week.

Framework, the company known for designing and selling upgradeable, modular laptops, has struggled with providing up-to-date software for its products. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham spoke with CEO Nirav Patel to discuss how the company is working on fixing these issues. Longtime Slashdot reader snikulin shares the report: Driver bundles remain un-updated for years after their initial release. BIOS updates go through long and confusing beta processes, keeping users from getting feature improvements, bug fixes, and security updates. In its community support forums, Framework employees, including founder and CEO Nirav Patel, have acknowledged these issues and promised fixes but have remained inconsistent and vague about actual timelines. [...] Patel says Framework has taken steps to improve the update problem, but he admits that the team's initial approach -- supporting existing laptops while also trying to spin up firmware for upcoming launches -- wasn't working. "We started 12th-gen [Intel Framework Laptop] development, basically the 12th-gen team was also handling looking back at 11th-gen [Intel Framework Laptop] to do firmware updates there," Patel told Ars. "And it became clear, especially as we continued to add on more platforms, that just wasn't a sustainable path to proceed on."

Part of the issue is that Framework relies on external companies to put together firmware updates. Some components are provided by Intel, AMD, and other chip companies to all PC companies that use their chips. Others are provided by Insyde, which writes UEFI firmware for Framework and others. And some are handled by Compal, the contract manufacturer that actually produces Framework's systems and has also designed and sold systems for most of the big-name PC companies. As far back as August 2023, Patel has written that the plan is to work with Compal and Insyde to hire dedicated staff to provide better firmware support for Framework laptops. However, the benefits of this arrangement have been slow to reach users. "[Compal] started recruiting on their side towards the end of last year," Patel told Ars. "And now, just at the beginning of this year, we've been able to get that whole team into place and start onboarding them. And especially after Lunar New Year, which is in early February, that team is now up and running at full speed." The goal, Patel says, is to continuously cycle through all of Framework's actively supported laptops, updating each of them one at a time before looping back around and starting the process over again. Functionality-breaking problems and security fixes will take precedence, while additional features and user requests will be lower-priority. ... snikulin adds: "As a recent Framework 13/AMD owner, I can confirm that it does not sleep properly on a default Windows 11 install. When I close the lid in the evening, the battery is dead the next morning. It's interesting to hear from Linus Sebastian (LTT) on the topic because he is a stakeholder in Framework."

Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Arm are among Canonical's "silicon partners," a program that "ensures maximum Ubuntu compatibility and long-term support with certified hardware," according to Web Pro News.

And now Qualcomm is set to be Canonical's next silicon partner, "giving Qualcomm access to optimized versions of Ubuntu for its processors." Companies looking to use Ubuntu on Qualcomm chips will benefit from an OS that provides 10 years of support and security updates.

The collaboration is expected to be a boon for AI, edge computing, and IoT applications. "The combination of Qualcomm Technologies' processors with the popularity of Ubuntu among AI and IoT developers is a game changer for the industry," commented Dev Singh, Vice President, Business Development and Head of Building, Enterprise & Industrial Automation, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc...
"Optimised Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core images will be available for Qualcomm SoCs," according to the announcement, "enabling enterprises to meet their regulatory, compliance and security demands for AI at the edge and the broader IoT market with a secure operating system that is supported for 10 years." Qualcomm Technologies chose to partner with Canonical to create an optimised Ubuntu for Qualcomm IoT chipsets, giving developers an easy path to create safe, compliant, security-focused, and high-performing applications for multiple industries including industrial, robotics and edge automation...

Developers and enterprises can benefit from the Ubuntu Certified Hardware program, which features a growing list of certified ODM boards and devices based on Qualcomm SoCs. These certified devices deliver an optimised Ubuntu experience out-of-the-box, enabling developers to focus on developing applications and bringing products to market.