AMD Reveals Latest Plans For Open-Source openSIL With Replacing AGESA, Zen 6 Milestone

[bernstein]

tl;dr It enables devs to make the firmware running on the x86 parts completely open-source.

the primary driver behind this is, battling for performance-per-watt supremacy or selling cheaper are no longer the only factors in selling silicon.
big customers are willing to pay for control of (parts of) the firmware stack. So, if they keep roughly competitive in perf-per-watt, it will give them an advantage in datacenters and other big corporate customers.

Obviously open-sourcing x86 firmware & gpu-drivers nowadays isn't as open as doing that 10 or 20 years ago. Much moved to gpu/cpu-psp firmware. Nevertheless this is infinitely better than what we've ever had.

IMHO initially a huge part into this was valve. sure amd would have loved to be in the nintendo switch 2, but that was always a longshot. selling ~4 million steam deck apu's may pale in comparison to 140 million switches or 61 million ps5's. But selling ~8 million dGPUs & ~45million laptop cpus in the same timeframe (as the deck) just shows how important valve as a single customer is for amd. it's equivalent to selling half of their dgpus or 10% of their apus to a single customer...

with ai gpus now selling like hotcakes & their margins being crazy, things obvioulsy look a bit different.
still, since amd is trailing nvidia here, they will have to lean heavily on that openness to compete, so i dob't much has changed.

[cutterjohn]

Awesome, my only concern with this is that if they introduce it in desktop Zen 6, it will mean that Zen 5 is that last AM5 generation. This would make me angry since I got a Zen 4 and was planning to upgrade to Zen 6 once it comes out, giving that Zen 5 is underwhelming for games.

How ITF does this mean tham that the socket is gone exactly? Think about it! This has NOTHING to do WITH the fscking SOCKET FFS!

[icon]

Can anyone explain what exactly this will do?

tl;dr It enables devs to make the firmware running on the x86 parts completely open-source.

I know at the most basic level AGESA is the first bit of code loaded that initializes the CPU cores, memory controller and defines CPU operating characteristics (voltages, clocks, timings of various components).

This was AGESA ~8 years ago. Starting with Zen, some things moved into the PSP (small ARM core), this includes the memory-controller initialization. The current roadmap is only about the parts left in AGESA today, i.e. what runs on the x86 cores.

I get that openSIL is supposed to be the "next generation" version of AGESA, but what exactly is "open" about it? My assumption (based on what other companies have done), is that just the base code itself will be open, but all "values" that needed to be loaded into the CPU registers and cache (like actual CPU configuration stuff, microcode, voltage/frequency curves, whatever) is just going to be in an encrypted binary blob.

All the x86 code and "values" would be open-source. This does not include microcode updates. Technically they run on the same piece of hardware, but it's not x86 code, just microcode. I wouldn't expect that to become open-source for any competitive CPU, but I hope to be surprised

What they are heading towards right now is huge step forward. Unlike the open-source AGESA that we had ~10 years ago, it wouldn't be something that is expensively scrubbed for publishing but an actual open-source upstream. And they even expect to integrate the community into openSIL development, i.e. not just code drops.

[jindam]

* https://github.com/openSIL/openSIL/c...c804905e243060 was after may day aka may 2
* oh...

[Davonious]

this makes me wonder what are they leaving on the table by sticking to a socket for so long, intel told as point that they needed to change it so they could make bigger ....

profits". I have no doubt the predominant reason for that many changes to the CPU socket over the years was profit related. Oh, of course someone could come up with a technical 'advantage' to provide plausibility, but five will get you ten the technical reasons were just a fig leaf in most cases. Not all, however, I'm not that much of a cynic.

[Doomer]

this makes me wonder what are they leaving on the table by sticking to a socket for so long, intel told as point that they needed to change it so they could make bigger changes to the cpu layout or something (same as amd said for the threadripper socket shitshow a few years ago) , I wonder how true this is.
I'm all for backward compatibility for as long as possible though so I'm not really complaining.

[Anux]

Thanks for the link. So we think it highly likely but it can still change - they did 3 architectures on AM4 and apparently, it was quite the challenge. Now we expect 4 architectures over 5+ years? Maybe the socket will stay the same but MBs might not support the new chips after some point. TBF, I'd expect them to split them into two platforms on DDR5 rather than single huge one but maybe I am too pessimistic

They actually were pretty consistent with AM-Sockets correlating to DDR standards. AM2 -> DDR2 and so on. Of course the highly unspecific promises that they commit to are done to keep every possible door open for the future so no one can sue them over changing to AM6 one gen earlier and they could keep AM5 alive like they do with AM4 and ever more Zen3 SKUs.

DDR6 mass production is far away, probably mid/end of 2026. So any Zen that comes out before (Zen6 end of 2025) will most likely come with DDR5 and therefore AM5.

[arakan94]

Well they actually said 4 CPU gens on AM5 and then paddled back to 2027+, while yes that isn't a guaranty, we know that DDR6 will come with Zen 8 and it would be highly unlikely that they change the socket a year or so before they switch it again for DDR6.

Thanks for the link. So we think it highly likely but it can still change - they did 3 architectures on AM4 and apparently, it was quite the challenge. Now we expect 4 architectures over 5+ years? Maybe the socket will stay the same but MBs might not support the new chips after some point. TBF, I'd expect them to split them into two platforms on DDR5 rather than single huge one but maybe I am too pessimistic

[Anux]

Really? Can you give me a link to source please?

https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-15-juli-2024#

Afaik they said no such thing - just the oblique "AM5 will be supported into 202x".. BTW they said AM4 will be supported into 2024 (or maybe even 2025?) and it is getting microcode updates and even new SKUs. But that doesn't mean it's getting new CPUs.

Well they actually said 4 CPU gens on AM5 and then paddled back to 2027+, while yes that isn't a guaranty, we know that DDR6 will come with Zen 8 and it would be highly unlikely that they change the socket a year or so before they switch it again for DDR6.

[arakan94]

AMD already said that at least zen6 will come to AM5.

Really? Can you give me a link to source please?

Afaik they said no such thing - just the oblique "AM5 will be supported into 202x".. BTW they said AM4 will be supported into 2024 (or maybe even 2025?) and it is getting microcode updates and even new SKUs. But that doesn't mean it's getting new CPUs.