• Linux Patches Surface For Supporting The Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5

  Last year Creative Labs introduced the Sound BlasterX AE-5 PCI Express gaming sound card while finally there are some patches pending for supporting this high-end sound card in Linux.

  Connor McAdams who most recently got the Creative Recon3D support into good shape on Linux has now been working on getting the Sound BlasterX AE-5 working well on Linux.

• Blockchain Training Takes Off

  Meanwhile, job postings related to blockchain and Hyperledger are taking off, and knowledge in these areas is translating into opportunity. Careers website Glassdoor lists thousands of job posts related to blockchain.

• AMD Picasso Support Comes To The RadeonSI OpenGL Driver

  Last week AMD sent out initial support for yet-to-be-released "Picasso" APUs with the Linux AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. Today on the user-space side the support was merged for the OpenGL RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

  Picasso details are still fairly light but they are expected to be similar to Raven Ridge and for the AM4 processor socket as well as an edition for notebooks. On the same day as publishing the Picasso AMDGPU kernel patches, AMD also went ahead and published the Linux patches for the "Raven 2" APUs too.

• The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Arrives For Linux Benchmarking

  It looks like NVIDIA has their launch-day Linux support in order for the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards slated to ship later this week as arriving today at Phoronix was the RTX 2080 Ti.

  The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is NVIDIA's new flagship desktop GPU with the Turing GPU architecture, 4352 CUDA cores, a 1635MHz boost clock speed rating for this Founder's Edition model, 11GB of GDDR6 video memory yielding a 616 GB/s memory bandwidth rating, and designed to suit real-time ray-tracing workloads with their RTX technology. Pricing on the RTX 2080 Ti Founder's Edition is $1,199 USD. Last week NVIDIA published more details on the Turing architecture for those interested as well as on the new mesh shader capability.

• Canonical Developers Now Preparing Mir 1.0 For Release With Wayland Support

  Mir 1.0 was talked about for release last year but at the last minute they reverted it to Mir 0.28. There is now a patch pending that is once again attempting the Mir 1.0 milestone.

  Mir 1.0 was pulled back previously after Canonical shifted away from its mobile/convergence effort as well as slashed some of the Mir resources involved. Since then Mir has continued to mature but with a focus on offering Wayland protocol compatibility and a platform still catering to Snaps and Ubuntu IoT use-cases.

  With the Wayland support within Mir squared away for the essentials, now it seems they are preparing for the Mir 1.0 banner.

• NVIDIA Further Details Turing's Mesh Shaders, Supports OpenGL/Vulkan

  Later this week the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" GPUs begin shipping and one of the interesting additions with this new GPU architecture is support for mesh shaders.

  Mesh shaders are part of a new programmable geometric shading pipeline that allows the generation of compact "meshlet" meshes on-chip. Mesh shaders work with not only Microsoft Direct3D 12 but can also be setup with new OpenGL/Vulkan extensions.

• All of the WineConf 2018 Videos Are Now Available

  Happening back at the end of June was WineConf 2018 in The Hague as the annual Wine developer conference. The remaining video recordings from that event are finally available.

To deliver a full-featured article for launch, my look at AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and 2950X combined Windows and Linux performance in the same article. As it turns out, that was a mistake, since few people noticed we even had Linux benchmarks, despite there being an obvious demand for them.

Before publication, I debated on whether or not I should break Linux performance into its own article, but in this particular case, I opted for the combo because I felt the bigger picture was needed. That’s because in Windows, performance scaling on such a big CPU is hit-or-miss, whereas the Linux kernel seems to support AMD’s biggest no problem.

I am not going to stand here (or sit) and pretend to understand why the 2990WX doesn’t perform so well in all Windows tests, because getting a clear answer out of anyone is tough. No one wants to pass around the blame, but by all appearances, it looks like a bulk of the problem is Windows. This article exists to not only draw attention to that, but also highlight a bit better what the 2990WX is capable of – if the software in question can take advantage of it.

• AMD ROCm 1.9 Available WIth Vega 20 Support & Upstream Kernel Compatibility

  For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open Compute stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features.

  Initially we were looking forward to ROCm 1.9 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support, which ended up being back-ported to the 1.8 series. But other headlining features of ROCm 1.9 include Vega 20 "Vega 7nm" support, a ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) library, HIP/HPCC improvements, rocprof for ROCm profling, compatibility with the upstream AMDKFD support now found in the mainline Linux kernel (Linux 4.17+), and various other improvements.

• NVIDIA Publishes An In-Depth Look At Turing

  Next week is when the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards will begin to ship while today is when NVIDIA lifted the embargo on "unboxing" videos/pictures and talking more about this new GPU microarchitecture.

  NVIDIA has posted their own in-depth Turing architecture look. Go check it out if you want to learn more about Turing's quite fascinating design and improvements over particularly the GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" series.

  Unfortunately no unboxing/reports on our end today... NVIDIA still appears to be not too interested in Linux gamers for the GeForce RTX 2080 series. While they have sent out hardware for many of the past launches, for Turing I am having a difficult time even getting them to respond to my inquiries. I am told by at least one NVIDIA'ian though that there will be Linux drivers in time for launch-day... We'll see.