Over the past two days, six patches for AMD's Power Management Controller driver have been released on Linux. As reported by Phoronix, these PMC driver patches for yet-unreleased Family 1Ah CPUs most likely refer to AMD's Zen 5 CPUs, which will compete with the best CPUs. One of the most essential functionalities the PMC enables is various sleep states, including "s2idle", a software-only system sleep state.
As crucial as these six patches are to underlying system functionality, they only modify two dozen lines of code and don't reveal much else, at least on a surface-level inspection.
That said if we consider the timing of these driver patches just ahead of 2024 and the steady stream of AMD Family 1Ah Linux patches we've been seeing since July of this year, it seems like AMD is intent on laying the needed groundwork for a Zen 5 release for Linux operating systems as quickly as possible.
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The pattern of these releases may mean that AMD plans to launch Zen 5 earlier in 2024 than Zen 4 and Zen 3, which were both Q4 releases of their respective years. Last week's leak of a next-gen Zen 5c EPYC CPU also leans toward this, though the CPU in question is technically an engineering sample and not the final CPU.
One anticipated feature of the Zen 5 will be the Navi/RDNA 3.5 iGPU architecture. Zen 5 iGPU leaks allegedly point toward iGPU designs with as many as 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units, several CUs comparable to the RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 6750 XT, which competes with the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. Power like that will likely allow AMD to regain their iGPU performance lead from Meteor Lake's Arc graphics in Linux.
The potential of AMD RDNA 3.5 iGPUs in Linux may also start pushing us closer toward the Steam Deck 2, or at least better competition for the Steam Deck OLED and ROG Ally, which top out at 8 RDNA 2 CUs and 4 RDNA 3 CUs, respectively.
