AMD announces new update to address Ryzen 9000 performance issues ahead of Intel Arrow Lake launch, but it has already lost its early advantage
There’s no doubt that the AMD Ryzen 9000 series has had a rocky launch, but AMD’s latest fixes for the entire lineup of chips could go a long way toward easing the concerns of gamers and creators who may be holding off on buying one of the new chips.
The fix, which is part of the new AGESA ComboAM5 PI 1.2.0.2 microcode update for various AM5 motherboard UEFI BIOSes, exists according to TechPowerUp.
First, users can configure the PPT of the AMD Ryzen 9600X and AMD Ryzen 9700X (cTDP) in the updated BIOS to 140W (which translates to 105W TDP) while maintaining their warranty. This allows users to effectively overclock the base 65W (88W PPT) chips without the risk of wearing them out and not being able to replace them.
Secondly, the BIOS updates will improve inter-core latency performance on the AMD Ryzen 9900X and AMD Ryzen 9950X. These two chips use two Complex Compute Dies (CCDs) instead of a single monolithic chip for all cores.
In order for the two CCDs – which have 6+6 and 8+8 cores for the AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X respectively – to function as a single unit, there must be a connection between the two CCDs. This introduces latency when cores need to communicate with each other or when the OS scheduler needs to allocate work to different CPU cores.
Normally the chips are optimized to negate this latency as much as possible, but according to AMD, the issue with the 9900X and 9950X’s high core-to-core latency was “mainly due to some corner cases where it takes two transactions to get both read as well as write, when information is shared between cores on different parts of a Ryzen 9 9000 series processor.”
“However, since the launch of the 9000 series we have been working to optimize this. In the new 1.2.0.2 BIOS update we have managed to halve the number of transactions for this use case, which helps reduce the core issues to- core latency in multi-CCD models.”
While reported core-to-core latency may still be higher than a monolithic chip, in real-world use this solution should improve the multi-core performance users experience with these chips.
So I’m not done reviewing the AMD Ryzen 9000 series yet, as some may have noticed. There are many planning reasons for this, but I managed to test all four chips and found, like many, that the performance gains were not great, if they existed at all.
Overall, though, I was more impressed with the power efficiency of the chips, which effectively lets you get the performance of the Ryzen 7000 series at lower power levels. I actually thought this was pretty great, as the Ryzen 7000 series are fantastic chips and offer more than enough performance for just about anyone, and I’ve been wondering how chipmakers are supposed to call a truce on performance and focus on efficiency.
That said, I understand why many would want more performance and better gene-on-gen improvement, even if I would advise them to ask if that’s really necessary.
In either case, however, it’s generally a good rule to give consumers more choice rather than less, and in the case of the 9600X and 9700X, you can decide whether better performance or more efficiency best suits your needs, without you don’t have to worry about that. you are going to lose your investment in a chip because you have increased the power consumption.
As for the 9900X and 9950X, these two chips were specifically designed and marketed for high-performance use, so the importance of the generation-over-gen improvement is obvious. In that case, any fix for the disappointing multi-core performance of these chips is welcome, but how much gain users will reap remains to be seen.
Of course, all of this comes at a time when Intel looks set to introduce Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors later this month, meaning the few months it took for AMD to gain an edge early in this generation may have been missed. It will now really have to duke it out with Intel to maintain its recent market share gains, but considering we haven’t yet seen what Intel Arrow Lake can do, it’s still a bouncy ball as to who will come out on top in the future. end.
