AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) is a procedure library developed by

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a Information technology, hardware and F ...

(AMD), used to perform the Platform Initialization (PI) on mainboards using their

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new operating modes: 64-bit mode an ...

architecture. As part of the

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

of such mainboards, AGESA is responsible for the initialization of the CPU cores, chipset, main memory, and the

HyperTransport HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer Processor (computing), processors. It is a bidirectional Serial communication, serial/Parallel communication, parallel high-Bandwi ...

controller.

History

AGESA was open sourced in early 2011, aiming to aid in the development of coreboot, a project attempting to replace PC's proprietary

. However, such releases never became the basis for the development of coreboot beyond AMD's family 15h, as they were subsequently halted. AGESA became particularly relevant with the AM4 platform, which AMD designed for futureproofing, and as of May 2019 has served as the base for three different generations of CPUs based on its Zen architecture. For each of these generations, a new branch of AGESA code has been released. AGESA versioning often runs separately for each of these three releases, so numbering regressions are bound to happen when going from one generation to the next. The first version, named "Summit PI", launched in February 2017. It was targeted at the first generation Zen chips, and started with version 1.0.0.4. In October 2017, when Summit PI reached version 1.0.0.7, the branch was renamed to "Raven PI" (its version numbering was not reset), and it was released as the first version of AGESA to support Raven Ridge APUs. The second version, supporting the Zen's second generation, known as

Zen+ Zen+ is the name for a computer processor microarchitecture by AMD. It is the successor to the first gen Zen microarchitecture, and was first released in April 2018, powering the second generation of Ryzen processors, known as Ryzen 2000 for mai ...

, is named "Pinnacle PI", after the Ryzen processors' codename, Pinnacle Ridge. It launched in February 2018 with an initial version of 1.0.0.0a. Then in March 2019, the third iteration of AGESA, named "ComboAM4 PI", was released, starting at version 0.0.7.0, introducing support for Zen 2-based processors. "ComboAM4v2" supports Zen 3-based processors, while "ComboAM5PI" supports Zen 4-based processors in socket AM5 motherboards. "ChagallWS PI" for the sWRX8 platform, supporting ThreadRipper Pro processors based on the Chagall architecture. In April 2023, AMD announced plans to replace the aging AGESA codebase with a new open-source firmware called "AMD openSIL". The new firmware is expected to be ready by 2026.

Version history

References

External links

Specification document by AMD
(2008)
ThomasNet
General Software, Inc. First BIOS Provider to Support AMD Barcelona
coreboot
LinuxBIOS Enablement Strategy @AMD & AGESA Info (PDF)
AGESA source code
Link to AGESA source code in coreboot. The repository history contains AGESA source code for previously-supported platforms. {{AMD technology AMD technologies BIOS

History

Version history

See also

References

External links