AMD's ancient Bulldozer and Piledriver platforms getting new open source firmwares in 2025 — update delivers 15-second boot-up times with 256GB memory setups
AMD's FX series and Opteron CPUs based on Bulldozer and Piledriver are still being supported through a third-party on a handful of motherboards.
(Image credit: AMD)
Believe it or not, AMD processors based on Bulldozer and Piledriver are receiving firmware updates in 2025 through third-party open-source firmware developers. Providing these updates is an independent software project called 15h.org, which supports a handful of server and desktop boards.
One of the developers, Mike Rothfuss, wrote to Phoronix about several major updates the project has already published. These included bug fixes and performance updates such as bug free RAM initialization, an increase in memory support to 512GB, "fast and reliable boots" with the platform now booting consistently within a 15 second window for systems boasting 256GB of RAM, bug free IOMMU support, full support for AMD's speculative execution patches, support for up to four PCIe devices and more.
The project is developing firmware updates for these processors because they represent the final high-performance x86 CPUs that are not hamstrung by newer UEFI security features such as firmware signing. This makes these chips some of the newest CPUs that can be harnessed to build a fully open-source system, from the operating system all the way down to the firmware level.
Phoronix reports that 15h.org uses existing AMD open-source firmware code to implement these updates. Back when Bulldozer was new, AMD reportedly promoted Coreboot and made its AGESA code open source.
Bulldozer and Piledriver are renowned for their terrible single-core performance and earned a reputation as some of AMD's worst ever CPU designs. Regardless, both architectures still provided competitive multi-core performance for their time, making them ideal for heavily multi-threaded applications.
The 15h.org officially supports several server and desktop motherboards that run either FX or Operon Bulldozer/Piledriver processors, featuring the Asus KGPE-D16, SuperMicro H8SCM, and SuperMicro H8SGL. There is also beta support for the Asus F2A85-M, 2A85-M Pro, F2A85-M Le, SuperMicro H8DGi, H8DG6, H8QGi+-F, and H8QG6+-F.
Bulldozer and Piledriver CPUs might not be the fastest CPU around, even by 2011-2015 standards, but they are the fastest chips capable of running completely open-source firmware from the ground up. This will inevitably be appealing to Linux enthusiasts who want to create their own desktops and servers from scratch while having complete control over their system's BIOS.
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So I disagree with description of Opteron's as "worst ever CPU design". At their time they were solid 64-bit chips, with better price/performance than comparable Intel offerings. Nice to hear about open source firmware. Control over such firmware can have an advantage in real-time control applications, as closed-source commercial firmware can result in periodic latency spikes due to firmware code running in competition with the OS (not sure if all motherboards do it).
