Less than one month after releasing the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.3, the Intel team maintaining "IGC" today released version 1.0.4.

Of Intel's keynote announcements this week kicking off their first public Open-Source Technology Summit, surprisingly not attracting too much attention this week was news of their ModernFW initiative to create a new modular and open-source firmware solution to replace aging legacy code on motherboards.

While Intel's open-source Linux support is largely stellar and was a big focus of this week's Open-Source Technology Summit in Washington, their FreeBSD support isn't nearly as polished but over the past roughly year and a half they've been establishing a FreeBSD team and working towards feature parity and supporting critical functionality for their customers.

A few days back I posted a number of Intel OpenCL benchmarks between their former Beignet and new "NEO" Linux compute stacks that was done using a Skylake NUC for the Iris Pro 580 graphics. For those wondering how these two open-source Intel OpenCL implementations compare for the more common UHD Graphics 630, here are some benchmarks using an Intel Core i9 8700K "Coffeelake" processor.

For those wondering how Intel's new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver is performing relative to various NVIDIA and AMD discrete graphics cards, here are some quick tests of older/lower-end parts.

Intel is running their once internal-only Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) in Washington this week but for a first time they have begun inviting customers and industry stakeholders and others to this annual open-source shindig. We're out here for the very interesting event with Imad Sousou and Raja Koduri talking today and some highly interesting technical talks ahead tomorrow. Here is the initial slew of announcements.

Intel just disclosed a new speculative execution side-channel vulnerability in its processors similar to the existing Spectre/L1TF vulnerabilities. This new disclosure is called the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS).

Intel "Comet Lake" CPUs look like they will be well supported when running on the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel or later.

Back at the Embedded Linux Conference in March 2018, Sound Open Firmware (SOF) was announced by Intel Open-Source Technology GM, Imad Sousou. The kernel-side patches to this open-source sound firmware were published shortly thereafter while now finally after going through several rounds of public code review, the kernel changes have been merged for Linux 5.2.

Intel released version 19.17.12918 of their OpenCL "NEO" open-source compute runtime stack this week.

Baytrail era systems have been a bit notorious on Linux but at least one recent regression is now resolved that for the past few kernel releases had broke hibernation support for Intel Baytrail and Cherrytrail SoC systems.

It looks like Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver support is now officially ready to roll for the "Gen 11" graphics to be found with Icelake, Elkhart Lake, and whatever other Gen11 graphics parts may end up coming. The latest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver code now marks Gen 11 as being feature-complete.

With today's release of the GCC 9 code compiler among the many features offered in this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection is the initial "cascadelake" target/tuning support that enables AVX-512 VNNI tuning by default as the most notable change over the former "skylake-avx512" GCC target. Anyhow, for those wondering how the GCC 9 performance differs compared to last year's GCC 8 compiler release, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

While it's looking like we are months out from seeing Intel "Gen 11" graphics in any Icelake parts and the Iris Gallium3D driver should be the default driver before year's end, the current "i965" Mesa driver has enabled fast color clears support for these next-generation graphics processors.

In addition to investing in their new "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver and continuing to mature their "ANV" Vulkan driver, they do continue bolstering their OpenCL "NEO" open-source Linux driver that doesn't receive as much attention by the community but is beginning to appear within Linux distribution repositories as the successor to their earlier "Beignet" OpenCL driver.

Following questions from our forum goers, there's now an overview of the current state of Intel's new "Iris" Gallium3D driver and its road-map for the remainder of the year in being the company's next-gen OpenGL driver that should be in especially good shape by the time Icelake "Gen 11" hardware arrives.

On top of Intel's new open-source OpenGL driver seeing some hefty performance optimizations, the Iris Gallium3D driver has picked up another OpenGL extension ahead of the Mesa 19.1 branching.

There is just one week to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze and branching for this next quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers. Notable this round is the introduction of the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver for supporting Broadwell graphics and newer atop this next-gen OpenGL driver ahead of next year's Xe Graphics dGPU launch. With days to go until the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze, more performance optimizations have landed.

Intel continues working on its SPMD compiler as part of their SPIR-V translator running on the CPU and other efforts. ISPC is the Intel SPMD Program Compiler and at the end of last week reached its version 1.11 milestone for this C variant compiler designed for single program, multiple data programming.

Intel's i40e / XL710 Ethernet driver will begin supporting Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) with the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel.

For those wondering about Intel's MKL-DNN "Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks" performance on Cascade Lake, here are some reference benchmarks using the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 setup including when using the GCC 9 compiler for building this Intel open-source library and employing the "cascadelake" compiler tuning.

Intel's open-source developers sent in another pull request this morning to DRM-Next of additional feature material they are planning on having in the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel.

Following yesterday's Intel Iris vs. i965 OpenGL benchmarks against Windows 10, there is already an optimization out of our latest testing as a result.

Intel developers continue prepping the Linux support for next-generation Intel Xeon "Cooper Lake" processors, particularly around its addition of the new BFloat16 instruction.

In February of 2018 Intel open-sourced their new OpenCL Linux driver dubbed "NEO" that is the replacement to their long-standing "Beignet" OpenCL driver. This modern OpenCL stack is on its way now to the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian distributions.

Yesterday Intel finally announced their SVT-AV1 video encoder as a promising high-performance AV1 encoder but it turns out they also have open-source plans this year for developing a performant AV1 decoder, among other interesting items on their road-map.

We've been pretty much exclusively reporting on - and benchmarking - the Intel SVT-AV1 open-source encoder since the start of February while finally today Intel has formally announced this initiative. It also turns out Netflix is cooperating with Intel on this Scalable Video Technology with their plan to make use of it.

IWD, the Intel open-source wireless daemon for Linux systems that they are positioning to potentially replace WPA Supplicant in the future, is out this week with two new updates.

Continuing on from yesterday's Linux OS comparison/benchmarks on Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake CPUs, here are some follow-up tests focusing on the video encode performance for this dual Xeon Platinum 8280 server when focusing on Intel's high-performance "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) encoders for VP9, AV1, and H.265/HEVC.

Alongside many other data-centric announcements yesterday, Intel quietly released the Wi-Fi 6 AX200 802.11ax wireless adapters formerly known by the Cyclone Peak codename.