Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can now launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world. In addition, the Arm-based virtual machines can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This ability has been in preview and will be generally available over the coming weeks in all the regions that offer the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we launched the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. These new virtual machines have been engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads. Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and.NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

Ansys announced that Ansys Mechanical is one of the first commercial finite element analysis (FEA) programs supporting AMD Instinct accelerators, the newest data center GPUs from AMD. The AMD Instinct accelerators are designed to provide exceptional performance for data centers and supercomputers to help solve the world's most complex problems. To support the AMD Instinct accelerators, Ansys developed APDL code in Ansys Mechanical to interface with AMD ROCm libraries on Linux, which will support performance and scaling on the AMD accelerators.

Ansys' latest collaboration with AMD resulted in a solution that, according to Ansys' tests, significantly speeds up simulation of large structural mechanical models—between three and six times faster for Ansys Mechanical applications using the sparse direct solver. Adding support for AMD Instinct accelerators in Ansys Mechanical gives customers greater flexibility in their choice of high-performance computing (HPC) hardware.

Intel yesterday confirmed its plans to extend its Meteor Lake architecture towards shores other than general processing. According to Phoronix, Intel posted a new driver that lays the foundations for VPU (Versatile Processing Unit) support under Linux. The idea here is that Intel will integrate this VPU within its 14th Gen Meteor Lake architecture, adding AI inferencing acceleration capabilities to its silicon. A sure-fire way to achieve enormous gains in AI processing, especially in performance/watt. Interestingly, Intel is somewhat following Apple's footsteps here, as the company already includes AI-dedicated processing cores in its desktop/laptop Apple Silicon processors since the M1 days.

Intel's VPU architecture will surely be derived from Movidius' designs, which Intel acquired back in 2016 for a cool $400 million. It's unclear which parts of Movidius/Intel IP will be included in the VPU units to be paired with Meteor Lake: whether a full-blown, SoC (System on Chip)-like VPU design such as the Myriad X VPU, or if Intel will take select bits of the architecture (plus the equivalent of five additional years of research and development), sprinkling them on top of their upcoming architecture. We do know the VPU itself will include a memory management unit, a RISC-based microcontroller, a Neural Compute System (what exactly entails this compute system and its slices is the mysterious part) and network-on-chip capabilities.

Today, the AMD GPUOpen announced that AMD developed a new tool for game developers using ray tracing technologies to help organize the model geometries in their scenes. Called Radeon Raytracing Analyzer (RRA) 1.0, it is officially available to download for Linux and Windows and released as a part of the Radeon Developer Tool Suite. With rendering geometries slowly switching from rasterization to ray tracing, developers need a tool that will point out performance issues and various workarounds in the process. With RRA, AMD has enabled all Radeon developers to own a tool that will answer many questions like: how much memory is the acceleration structure using, how complex is the implemented BVH, how many acceleration structures are used, does geometry in the BLAS axis align enough, etc. Developers will find it very appealing for their ray tracing workloads.

AMDRRA is able to work because our Radeon Software driver engineers have been hard at work, adding raytracing support to our Developer Driver technology. This means that once your application is running in developer mode - using the Radeon Developer Panel which ships with RRA - the driver can log all of the acceleration structures in a scene with a single button click. The Radeon Raytracing Analyzer tool can then load and interrogate the data generated by the driver, presenting it in an easy-to-understand way.

ORICO - Shenzhen-based innovative enterprise focusing on high-performance solutions for USB data transmission and charging - is proud to unveil the ORICO USB4 High Speed Portable SSD Montage 40 Gbps series, with a striking and durable design inspired Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. The bold and bright aesthetic draws from Mondrian's famous work Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, incorporating the thick black lines and blocks of color that immediately distinguish the device from the monochrome alternatives on the market. Loud, but not lurid, the design is applied with the durable in-mold labeling technique also found in automobile manufacturing for its resistance to corrosion.

However, the product engineers at ORICO do not pursue form over function and have invested in the right technology to make the Montage 40 Gbps series one of the best-performing SSDs available. During performance testing, the drive achieved 3,126 MB/s reading speed, a 2,832 MB/s writing speed, and transferred 3 GB files in just one second, matching, and even surpassing, many leading products currently on the market. Accompanied by a versatile 2-in-1 data cable for USB type A and type C connections, the drive is widely compatible and able to be used with Mac OS, Windows, Android, and Linux operating systems without requiring a driver. Depending on user requirements, the Montage series offers capacity options ranging from 512 GB to 2 TB. "We are so excited to launch the eye-catching Montage series, serving superior performance and carrying a timeless aesthetic that really transcends style trends," commented Xu Yeyou, CEO of ORICO. "We had in mind on-the-go creatives, such as photographers and video editors, when designing the product."

DeepComputing and Xcalibyte today opened pre-orders for the industry's first native RISC-V development laptop. The hotly anticipated ROMA development platform features an unannounced quad-core RISC-V processor with a companion NPU/GPU for the fastest, seamless RISC-V native software development available.

"Native RISC-V compile is a major milestone," said Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer for RISC-V International. "The ROMA platform will benefit developers who want to test their software running natively on RISC-V. And it should be easy to transfer code developed on this platform to embedded systems."

The Exascale supercomputing race is now well underway, as the US-based Frontier supercomputer got delivered, and now we wait to see the remaining systems join the race. Today, during 79th HPC User Forum at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Terri Quinn at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) delivered a few insights into what El Capitan exascale machine will look like. And it seems like the new powerhouse will be based on AMD's Instinct MI300 APU. LLNL targets peak performance of over two exaFLOPs and a sustained performance of more than one exaFLOP, under 40 megawatts of power. This should require a very dense and efficient computing solution, just like the MI300 APU is.

As a reminder, the AMD Instinct MI300 is an APU that combines Zen 4 x86-64 CPU cores, CDNA3 compute-oriented graphics, large cache structures, and HBM memory used as DRAM on a single package. This is achieved using a multi-chip module design with 2.5D and 3D chiplet integration using Infinity architecture. The system will essentially utilize thousands of these APUs to become one large Linux cluster. It is slated for installation in 2023, with an operating lifespan from 2024 to 2030.

MediaTek today unveiled its new Genio platform for AIoT devices and introduced the first chip in the Genio family, the Genio 1200 designed for premium AIoT products. MediaTek Genio is a complete platform stack for the AIoT with powerful and ultra- efficient chipsets, open platform software development kits (SDKs) and a developer portal with comprehensive resources and tools. This all-in-one platform makes it easy for brands to develop innovative consumer, enterprise and industrial smart applications at the premium, mid-range and entry levels, and bring these devices to market faster. With MediaTek Genio, customers have access to all the hardware, software and resources needed to go from concept to design and manufacturing.

Customers can choose from a range of Genio chips to suit their product needs, and then use MediaTek's developer resources and the Yocto Linux open platform SDK to customize their designs. MediaTek also makes it easy for customers to access its partners' system hardware and software, and leverage partners' networks and sales channels. By offering an integrated, easy-to-use platform, MediaTek Genio reduces development costs and speeds up time to market, while providing long-term support for operating system updates and security patches that extend the product lifecycle. "Today MediaTek powers the most popular AIoT devices on the market. As the industry enters the next era of innovation, MediaTek's Genio platform delivers flexibility, scalability and development support brands need to cater to the latest market demands," said Jerry Yu, MediaTek Corporate Senior Vice President and General Manager of MediaTek's Computing, Connectivity and Metaverse Business Group. "We look forward to seeing the new user experiences brands bring to life with the Genio 1200 and its powerful AI capability, support for 4K displays and advanced imaging features."

It appears that one of AMD's partners has a Ryzen 7000 CPU or APU, with integrated graphics up and running in Linux. Based on details leaked, courtesy of the partner testing the chip using the Phoronix Test Suite and submitting the results to the OpenBenchmarking database. The numbers are by no means impressive, suggesting that this engineering sample isn't running at the proper clock speeds. For example, it only scores 63.1 FPS in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, where a Ryzen 9 6900HX manages 182.1 FPS, where both GPUs have been allocated 512 MB of system memory as the minimum graphics memory allocation.

The integrated GPU goes under the model name of GFX1036, with older integrated RDNA2 GPUs from AMD having been part of the GFX103x series. It's reported to have a clock speed of 2000/1000 MHz, although it's presumably running at the lower of the two clock speeds, if not even slower, as it's only about a third of the speed or slower, than the GPU in the Ryzen 9 6900HX. That said, the GPU in the Ryzen 7000-series is as far as anyone's aware, not really intended for gaming, since it's a very stripped down GPU that is meant to mainly be for desktop use and media usage, so it's possible that it'll never catch up with the current crop of integrated GPUs from AMD. We'll hopefully find out more in less than two weeks time, when AMD has its keynote at Computex.

NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules repo on GitHub. This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back. For Linux distribution providers, the open-source modules increase ease of use.

They also improve the out-of-the-box user experience to sign and distribute the NVIDIA GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are able to immediately package the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Distributions. Developers can trace into code paths and see how kernel event scheduling is interacting with their workload for faster root cause debugging. In addition, enterprise software developers can now integrate the driver seamlessly into the customized Linux kernel configured for their project.

For those that are considering, or have built their own NAS and are interested in the various OS options out there, Openmediavault 6—codenamned Shaitan—was officially released last week. The new version is based on Debian 11 and Linux kernel 5.16. The most noticeable new feature is the reworked UI that makes OMV feel somewhat more modern, even if it's no match when it comes to pretty design when compared to the operating systems for Asustor, Synology and QNAP. That said, the new UI brings with it a lot of improvements for those that aren't keen on doing things over the command line. OMV has been overhauled from the ground up, starting with a new installer that makes it easier to install from one USB drive to another.

Other new features include native container support, although for now, it's limited to a few select containers that appear as if they were regular plugins. Many of the new features have implemented various OMV Extras plugins as native features, but for anyone looking to expand on the base features, OMV Extras is still around and kicking and is still something of a must-have install. This is especially true if your OS drive is an SSD or USB drive, as the Flashmemory plugin is still an optional extra which no sensible person would want to do without. With the release of OVM 6, OVM 5 has been depreciated and will no longer be getting updates, so if you're using an older version of OMV, you might want to consider updating to the latest version.

Lambda, the Deep Learning Company, today in collaboration with Razer, released the new Lambda Tensorbook, the world's most powerful laptop designed for deep learning, available with Linux and Lambda's deep learning software. The sleek laptop, coupled with the Lambda GPU Cloud, gives engineers all the software tools and compute performance they need to create, train, and test deep learning models locally. Since its launch in 2012, Lambda has quickly become the de-facto deep learning infrastructure provider for the world's leading research and engineering teams. Thousands of businesses and organizations use Lambda including: all of the top five tech companies, 97 percent of the top research universities in the U.S. including MIT and Caltech, and the Department of Defense. These teams use Lambda's GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances to train neural networks for cancer detection, autonomous aircraft, drug discovery, self-driving cars, and much more.

"Most ML engineers don't have a dedicated GPU laptop, which forces them to use shared resources on a remote machine, slowing down their development cycle." said Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CEO of Lambda. "When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook solves this. It's pre-installed with PyTorch and TensorFlow and lets you quickly train and demo your models: all from a local GUI interface. No more SSH!"

Tachyum today announced it has completed validation of its Prodigy Universal Processor and software ecosystem with the operating system FreeBSD, and completed the Prodigy instruction set architecture (ISA) for FreeBSD porting. FreeBSD powers modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms in environments that value performance, stability, and security. It is the platform of choice for many of the busiest websites and the most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.

The validation of FreeBSD extends Tachyum's support for open-source operating systems and tools, including Linux, Yocto Project, PHP, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Apache, QEMU, Git, RabbitMQ, and more.

Magewell - the award-winning developer of innovative video interface and IP workflow solutions - today announced USB Fusion, a multi-input USB video capture device with integrated source switching and layout control. Building on the renowned ease-of-use of the company's market-leading USB Capture devices, the new hardware lets users combine camera and wired screenshare sources into attractive live presentations for online lectures, webinars, live streaming, video conferencing, news reporting, and other applications.

Featuring two HDMI inputs and one USB webcam input, USB Fusion lets users switch between 1080p60 HD sources or combine two inputs (picture-in-picture or side-by-side) into one output and bring the result into popular software via its USB 3.0 interface. Supporting the critical role of software in today's educational, corporate, and live event environments, the device is also ideal for houses of worship that wish to combine a camera signal with supporting visuals - such as lyrics displayed from a separate laptop - into a single live stream.

Elden Ring launched in late February to rave critic and consumer reviews. The game is an excellent showcase of From Software's gaming design ethos, but ultimately proves that the company's rendering engine still requires work after years of installments due to widely-reported stuttering issues - irrespective of hardware configuration. A fix for Elden Ring's stuttering issues has surfaced on late Monday - courtesy of Valve and its Proton wrapper, and only applicable to the Steam Deck. In a way, this turns Steam Deck into the smoothest device to play Elden Ring on.

The issue with Elden Ring's stuttering has been linked to the games' continuous shader loading. Apparently, Elden Ring allows users to enter its vast open-world without pre-compiling the required shaders (something that we've seen other games do through usually lengthy boot-up processes) for the specific hardware. This forces the game to constantly compile shaders as they're required (due to world loading, animation loading, among other triggers), which is responsible for the stuttering issues gamers on PC have been encountering.

Basemark launched today GPUScore, an all-new GPU (graphics processing unit) performance benchmarking suite for a wide device range from smartphones to high-end gaming PCs. GPUScore supports all modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan, Metal and DirectX, and operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

GPUScore will consist of three different testing suites. Today, the first one of these was launched, named Relic of Life. It is available immediately. Basemark will introduce the two other GPUScore testing suites during the following months. Relic of Life is ideal for benchmarking high-end gaming PCs' discrete graphics cards' GPUs. It requires hardware accelerated ray tracing, supports Vulkan and DirectX, and is available for both Windows and Linux. GPUScore: Relic of Life is an ideal benchmark for comparing Vulkan and DirectX accelerated ray tracing performance.

Intel's Alder Lake CPUs started the wave of hybrid designs spanning the consumer sector with high-performance P-cores and high-efficiency E-cores combined to make a mixed design work. And it seems like the replacement for it is already in progress, as the next-generation Intel "Raptor Lake" processors are continuing enablement in the Linux kernel. This next-generation Raptor Lake design will arrive towards the end of this year, and the software ecosystem is already preparing for its arrival. According to the report from Phoronix, audio support for Intel Raptor Lake processors has been added to the Linux kernel 5.18.

As the report points out, the enablement work is no different since days of Skylake, where adding new IDs to the driver gets the job done. However, what is interesting is that Raptor Lake is slowly getting the entire software ecosystem support functional. This shows with Linux kernel 5.17, where Raptor Lake-S Gen 12-based graphics card received initial software support. As the software matures, full support for Raptor Lake will come, especially as we enter the later months of 2022, when the next generation is supposed to arrive.

Mesh shader is a relatively new concept of a programmable geometric shading pipeline, which promises to simplify the whole graphics rendering pipeline organization. NVIDIA introduced this concept with Turing back in 2018, and AMD joined with RDNA2. Today, thanks to the finds of Phoronix, we have gathered information that Intel's DG2 GPU will carry support for mesh shaders and bring it under Vulkan API. For starters, the difference between mesh/task and traditional graphics rendering pipeline is that the mesh edition is much simpler and offers higher scalability, bandwidth reduction, and greater flexibility in the design of mesh topology and graphics work. In Vulkan, the current mesh shader state is NVIDIA's contribution called the VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. The below docs explain it in greater detail:

Vulkan API documentationThis extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.

There are new programmable shader types—the task and mesh shader—to generate these collections to be processed by fixed-function primitive assembly and rasterization logic. When task and mesh shaders are dispatched, they replace the core pre-rasterization stages, including vertex array attribute fetching, vertex shader processing, tessellation, and geometry shader processing.

congatec - a leading vendor of embedded and edge computing technology - introduces the 12th Generation Intel Core mobile and desktop processors (formerly code named Alder Lake) on 10 new COM-HPC and COM Express Computer-on-Modules. Featuring the latest high performance cores from Intel, the new modules in COM-HPC Size A and C as well as COM Express Type 6 form factors offer major performance gains and improvements for the world of embedded and edge computing systems. Most impressive is the fact that engineers can now leverage Intel's innovative performance hybrid architecture. Offering of up to 14 cores/20 threads on BGA and 16 cores/24 threads on desktop variants (LGA mounted), 12th Gen Intel Core processors provide a quantum leap [1] in multitasking and scalability levels. Next-gen IoT and edge applications benefit from up to 6 or 8 (BGA/LGA) optimized Performance-cores (P-cores) plus up to 8 low power Efficient-cores (E-cores) and DDR5 memory support to accelerate multithreaded applications and execute background tasks more efficiently.

Intel today released oneAPI 2022 toolkits. Newly enhanced toolkits expand cross-architecture features to provide developers greater utility and architectural choice to accelerate computing. "I am impressed by the breadth of more than 900 technical improvements that the oneAPI software engineering team has done to accelerate development time and performance for critical application workloads across Intel's client and server CPUs and GPUs. The rich set of oneAPI technologies conforms to key industry standards, with deep technical innovations that enable applications developers to obtain the best possible run-time performance from the cloud to the edge. Multi-language support and cross-architecture performance acceleration are ready today in our oneAPI 2022 release to further enable programmer productivity on Intel platforms," said Greg Lavender, Intel chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group.

New capabilities include the world's first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran, data parallel Python for CPUs and GPUs, advanced accelerator performance modeling and tuning, and performance acceleration for AI and ray tracing visualization workloads. The oneAPI cross-architecture programming model provides developers with tools that aim to improve the productivity and velocity of code development when building cross-architecture applications.

Valve has recently been testing NVIDIA DLSS support for their Proton Windows compatibility layer for Linux with an experimental version available in 6.3-7 and now fully supported with 6.3-8. This latest addition to Proton will allow NVIDIA Linux gamers to take full advantage of Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) in supported games. Proton has seen significant development attention recently with this release also bringing initial support for the BattlEye anti-cheat software enabling games such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and DayZ to run correctly. Epic Games have also previously announced that they are working with Valve to add support for their Easy AntiCheat software. This latest release also includes support for 24 new titles and various miscellaneous bug fixes.

QNAP Systems, Inc. (QNAP) today officially released the QuTS hero h5.0 operating system, the latest version of the ZFS-based NAS operating system. Including an upgraded Linux Kernel (5.10), improved security, WireGuard VPN support, snapshot instant clone, and free exFAT support, QNAP's QuTS hero NAS provides exceptional solutions for data storage/backup, virtualization, or time-sensitive collaborative media editing.

"Data security is a top priority for QNAP, and we have implemented a major system kernel update for QuTS hero to enhance NAS security and reliability," said Sam Lin, Product Manager of QNAP, adding "In QuTS hero h5.0, we have also optimized the overall performance to meet larger and complex business workloads."

As Valve is preparing to launch its handheld gaming console called Steam Deck, the company is investing a lot of resources into the software side of things. Powering the console is the company's custom SteamOS distribution, a modification of Arch Linux in today's form. In previous releases, Valve has been pushing its SteamOS as a modification of Debian Linux. However, that version didn't get updated in over two years, and the last release happened with version 2.195. When the Steam Deck console lands in the consumer's hands, we are supposed to see a new version of SteamOS, called SteamOS 3.0, become available for the public to download as any standalone Linux distribution.

With the release of 3.0, the company is switching to a rolling release OS embedded with bells and whistles to make gaming on Linux a viable option. All that is needed to fire up Steam and start gaming is already pre-installed, and you can get the same Steam Deck experience on your PC or any device that can run Linux. The moment this becomes available to the public, we will update you with more information.

Valve has recently announced a new program aimed at verifying game compatibility on the Steam Deck with a simple four-category classification system. Valve is reviewing the entire Steam library to see how each title performs in four key areas on the Steam Deck including input, display, seamlessness, and system support. Games need to feature full controller support and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard to fulfill the input requirement along with supporting the Steam Decks native resolution of 1280x800 or 1280x720. They will also need to work correctly with Proton including anti-cheat if no native Linux version is available along without displaying any warning messages.

Valve will mark games that fail some sections of these checks as playable meaning that the user may need to manually select a community-created controller configuration or use the touchscreen to navigate the launcher. Games that cannot run will be marked as unsupported while all other games will be classified as unknown meaning that Valve has yet to test the title on the Steam Deck. These new compatibility labels will be featured prominently throughout the Steam store on Steam Deck with detailed information about individual checks available. Valve will continuously update these ratings as developers launch updates for their games and they hope to have the feature live before deliveries of the Steam Deck begin.

With the x86 architecture, large hyperscale cloud providers have been experiencing all sorts of troubles, from high power consumption to the high pricing structure of these processors. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) build their processors based on 3rd party instruction set architecture designs. Today, Alibaba, the Chinese giant, has announced the launch of two processors made in-house to serve everything from edge to central server processing. First in line is the RISC-V-based Xuantie series of processors, which can run anything from AliOS, FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, Linux, Android, etc., to other operating systems as well. These processors are open-source, capable of modest processing capabilities, and designed as IPs that anyone can use. You can check them out on T-Head GitHub repositories here.

The other thing that Alibaba announced is the development of a 128-core custom processor based on the Arm architecture. Called Yitian 710 server SoC, TSMC manufactures it on the company on 5 nm semiconductor node. So far, Alibaba didn't reveal any details about the SoC and what Arm cores are used. However, this signifies that the company seeks technology independence from outside sources and wants to take it all in-house. With custom RISC-V processors for lower-power tasks and custom Arm server CPUs, the whole infrastructure is covered. It is just a matter of time before Alibaba starts to replace x86 makers in full. However, given the significant number of chips that the company needs, it may not happen at any sooner date.