Open-source News

The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake

Phoronix - Tue, 01/13/2026 - 02:38
When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the possible explanations there is the Spectre BHI "Branch History Injection" vulnerability and microcode plus Linux kernel mitigations having come out post-launch and affecting Meteor Lake CPUs. Sure enough, follow-up tests looking at the Spectre BHI impact have revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads for the Core Ultra processor.

Tinygrad 0.12 Released With Mesa NIR/NAK Support

Phoronix - Tue, 01/13/2026 - 01:35
Tinygrad 0.12 is out today for this deep learning stack led by George Hotz...

Firefox 147 Now Available With XDG Base Directory Specification Support

Phoronix - Mon, 01/12/2026 - 22:33
Firefox 147.0 release binaries have hit the Mozilla servers today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser. Firefox 147 is exciting for Linux users in finally delivering XDG Base Directory Specification support...

Intel Releases Open3D 0.19 With Experimental Cross-Platform GPU Support Using SYCL

Phoronix - Mon, 01/12/2026 - 22:19
Not to be confused with the Open 3D game engine, Intel's Intelligent Systems Lab Organization released Open3D 0.19 as the latest iteration of this open-source library for 3D data processing in Python and C++...

Nova Lake & Crescent Island Support Lands In The Intel Graphics Compiler

Phoronix - Mon, 01/12/2026 - 21:25
Released this morning is the Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" 2.27.10 that comes with initial support for next-generation Nova Lake and Crescent Island Xe3P hardware...

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