Posts tagged: amd

Inside amdgpu GART and IOMMU — How Zero-Copy GPU Access Works at the Kernel Level

Kernel-level deep dive into the amdgpu driver's GART, IOMMU integration, GPUVM page tables, GEM/TTM buffer objects, DMA-BUF zero-copy paths, and how the GPU accesses your malloc'd buffer without copying a single byte.

Infinity Fabric and Cache Coherence — How AMD and Apple Build Unified Memory

Silicon-level deep dive into Infinity Fabric, MOESI/MESI/MESIF cache coherence protocols, Apple UltraFusion, and how unified memory actually works at the transistor level.

Programming the NPU — ONNX Runtime, CoreML, DirectML, and Deploying to Apple ANE and XDNA 2

How to actually program NPUs — the software stacks, runtime compilers, quantization pipelines, and practical gotchas for Apple ANE, AMD XDNA 2, Qualcomm Hexagon, and Intel AI Boost.

APU vs GPU vs NPU — What Every Silicon Architecture Actually Does, Down to the Transistor

A technical deep dive into APU, GPU, and NPU architectures — memory hierarchies, interconnects, programming models, and why your laptop has all three on one chip.

Why I Stayed on X11 for AMD Laptop Dev in 2026

My AMD Barcelo laptop runs X11. Not because I'm stubborn — because the display server choice is a practical trade-off, not a religious one. Here's the real constraint matrix.

Fractional Scaling on KDE 6 — X11 vs Wayland Measured on AMD Barcelo

Real measurements on a Ryzen 7 7730U (Vega 7) laptop. KDE Plasma 6.7.2. X11 session vs Wayland session. No synthetic benchmarks — just what the compositor actually renders.

The AppImage/FUSE/GPU Crash Rabbit Hole I Debugged

Freebuff Desktop (an Electron AppImage) wouldn't launch on my AMD laptop. Three hours later: FUSE missing, extracted AppImage bug, Wayland GPU crash, X11 fallback. Here's the full autopsy.

CachyOS Kernel 7.0.12 Blank Screen — AMD Barcelo DMCUB Firmware Crash

Kernel 7.0.12 blank screen on AMD Barcelo GPUs — DMCUB firmware mismatch. Fix with amdgpu.dc=0, and whether the mainline kernel is worth the boot hassle over LTS.