20 years since the introduction of the first 64-bit x86 CPUs: A Look back at AMD’s Opteron Series and the Evolution of Processors.

20 years since the introduction of the first 64-bit x86 CPUs

It’s been 20 years (and 1 day) since AMD launched the first 64-bit x86 processors, the Sledgehammer-generation Opteron series. Not only the modern era of unlimited 32-bit memory addressing began, but also the death knell of Intel’s 64-bit x86 extension and, although it took a long time, the death knell of Intel Itanium processors (the first generation IA-64 named Merced was introduced in 2001).

Historically, let’s also recall a slightly later time when AMD had the Opteron 144 for Socket 939 on the market, when this 1.8GHz processor could be overclocked to around 2.7GHz on a good board (who remembers brands like DFI?). Back then, the higher ups at AMD wondered why so many server Opterons were being sold in that small republic in the middle of Europe. But the future, just a little further away, already revealed other processor cores, first a total of 2, later 4, and the multi-core / multi-thread era began to be written.

Today, the first Opterons are already obsolete, and the limits of usable CPUs for Linux are gradually moving further. AMD, however, cannot be denied that after 1999, when it narrowly blew away Intel’s launch of the first 1GHz x86 processor, it scored another significant notch with the quality of the AMD64 instruction set.

Intel Arc Driver Update for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

GPU support of the Intel Arc family is still under development, only the current Linux 6.2 kernel in combination with Mesa 23.x can be considered fully functional, so it is not surprising that many older versions of distributions do not in principle have full Intel Arc support, and this also applies to Ubuntu 22.04.x ​​LTS.

For this large group of Ubuntu users, Intel has prepared and maintains packages that include the newer DRM driver and DKMS module, plus the current version of Mesa, and now this latest LTS version of Ubuntu finally getting updateswhich can be described as comparable to the functional combo mentioned above.

The driver primarily targets separate Intel Arc cards and integrated solutions of this generation, however, it can also be used with iGPUs for generations such as Tiger Lake, Alder Lake and Raptor Lake or the older Rocket Lake – even in this case the user will benefit from the newer driver/Mesa, informs Phoronix.

Porting GIMP to GTK3 is complete

There are still a few small things left, but it’s different GIMP to GTK3 conversion complete and the main developer has already marked this part of the work on GIMP 3.0 as finished. The future we’ve been waiting for for many, many years is here, GIMP has been ported to GTK3 and there’s just a little bit left until the final version of GIMP 3.0 can be released.

A cursory glance at the roadmap says that there is still a little missing around running on Wayland, API adjustments for new plugins and other small things. Everything in more detail in the project roadmap.

A week in KDE: mostly bug fixes

Only the number of high-priority errors in Plasma decreased over the last week from 11 to 6. This time, the KDE developers mainly addressed errors, patching a total of 136 of them. But there were also a few novelties and improvements.

For example, Skanpage got a preview from which it is easier to scan two pages of a book at a time, or for example, to choose more selection areas for scan settings. The Elisa music player then supports Shuffle and Repeat modes control through MPRIS, so for example through the player widget in the main bar.

In Gwenview, several less essential things disappear from the editing bar (they are hidden in the menu since version 23.08, which, among other things, improves the usability of Gwenview especially on displays with a resolution of 1366×768, however ancient it is today, but still widely used.

Gwenview also no longer shows itself in the list of applications in which the orbáz can be opened, and this tool has also received improvements in the Zoom UI (finally, by simply clicking somewhere on the zoom slider, you can switch to the corresponding zoom value).

Plasma 5.27.5 then brings improvements to the estimate of remaining battery life. Further details as usual summarizes Nate Graham on his blog.

Released QEMU 8.0.0

238 developers have contributed to QEMU’s octal version, in total it carries more than 2800 commits. Changes in the new version include updates for ARM (emulation improvements, including Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52 cores) or several novelties for RISC-V and S390× or x86 (e.g. Xen guest support under KVM on Linux 5.12+, CPU model support Xeons, Sapphire Rapids, etc.). Details in new version announcementthen in more detail in the relevant entry on the project’s Wiki.