Raptor Computing Systems Community Forums (BETA)

Third Party Hardware => GPU Compute / Accelerators => Topic started by: pocock on May 07, 2020, 05:18:02 pm

Title: the microcode question
Post by: pocock on May 07, 2020, 05:18:02 pm
Raptor's workstations come with the AMD WX7100 GPU by default

While AMD is officially engaged in the production of the free/open source amdgpu driver, the AMD cards still require some microcode / blobs.

From the perspective of Talos II buyers/users, can anybody make suggestions about the best links/documents for helping decide upon the graphics and GPU strategy?

To put that another way: given that Talos II has VGA and the Blackbird's built-in HDMI can only do Full HD (1080p), if somebody wants to have one or more 4K displays and they don't need 3D, what are the recommended options without any microcode?
Title: Re: the microcode question
Post by: MauryG5 on August 09, 2020, 03:44:49 am
I currently have a 4K display and can use that resolution on my Power system. Also if I run the command to check 3D acceleration enabled, it tells me that it is enabled on my board. I use an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT to get all of this.
Title: Re: the microcode question
Post by: ClassicHasClass on August 10, 2020, 11:16:59 am
Maury, that doesn't help him because that still requires an AMD blob.

I'm not aware of a fully free 4K framebuffer ... yet. I'm told some people were putting RISC-V to such a task but I haven't heard much further and it might just be wishful thinking.
Title: Re: the microcode question
Post by: MPC7500 on August 10, 2020, 05:37:05 pm
What comes to mind is libreSOC (https://libre-soc.org/3d_gpu/). At first I was a bit skeptical, but now it looks promising.
Title: Re: the microcode question
Post by: MauryG5 on August 11, 2020, 07:58:42 am
I didn't quite understand your question at the time. Sorry... :-)
Title: Re: the microcode question
Post by: ClassicHasClass on August 11, 2020, 03:16:03 pm
Wow, libreSOC seems to have gotten along further than I thought. Worth keeping an eye on.