toms hardware AMD's ancient Bulldozer and Piledriver platforms getting new open source firmwares in 2025

[bonami2]

Quote

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.

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 | Tom's Hardware

WWW.TOMSHARDWARE.COM

---

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.

 

[pio]

Dude that's pretty cool that people are still developing on Bulldozer and Piledriver.  The article is correct, they really do have a special spot in hardware history where they're still modern enough to work, but yet old enough to not require all the firmware level screwery that we have on modern AM4 / AM5 systems (and Intel).