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

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.