AMD Renoir APUs Bringing "DCN 2.1" Display Engine

Raven Ridge APUs brought the DCN 1.0 "Display Core Next" engine, Navi GPUs upped that to a DCN 2.0 implementation for the display engine, and now the Renoir APUs are ushering in DCN 2.1. This is a bit interesting particularly with Renoir being a Vega-based GPU and not Navi as one would have hoped prior to the Vega confirmation in the earlier patches.

It's been interesting to follow the AMD Renoir APU patches for the Linux driver enablement this month. It started off at the beginning of the month with the initial Linux kernel driver support, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support, and then their kernel developers have been sending more recent patch series for other functionality not originally tackled in the AMDGPU Linux driver like new power management bits.

With a new patch series out today to the AMDGPU DC "Display Core" area are new display bits for Renoir. With 23 new patches amounting to 89k lines of new code (granted a significant chunk of that is header files) comes the display support for Renoir and the introduction of the "DCN2.1" display engine.

From quickly glancing through the DCN 2.1 bring-up, no major clues were revealed about any end-user changes, but nice to see there will be an upgraded display engine on these next-gen AMD APUs even without being Navi-based.