AMD busts Ryzen performance myths, clearing Windows 10 from blame

From PC World: Ryzen performance is the mystery that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories. AMD debunked most of them in a blog post Monday night.

For starters, the company said Windows 10’s scheduler isn’t guilty. Internet hardware detectives had started to focus their blame on Windows 10 scheduler, the part of the operating system that doles out work to each individual core or thread in a chip. Many believe Windows 10 scheduler is throwing out work to the wrong cores or threads, hobbling performance.

“We have investigated reports alleging incorrect thread scheduling on the AMD Ryzen processor,” AMD’s Robert Hallock wrote in the blog post. “Based on our findings, AMD believes that the Windows 10 thread scheduler is operating properly for 'Zen,' and we do not presently believe there is an issue with the scheduler adversely utilizing the logical and physical configurations of the architecture.”

Ryzen’s confusing benchmarks have fueled this hot debate. In many multi-threaded tasks, it performs like a bat out of hell and easily matches Intel CPUs that cost twice as much. But when it comes to gaming at standard resolutions of 1080p or at low-quality settings, the performance can lag behind Intel’s newest 7th-gen Kaby Lake CPU, as well as its Broadwell-E chip.

The Windows 10 scheduler theory thrived in part because the problem didn’t manifest itself in Windows 7. AMD shot down that notion in the same blog post.

“Finally, we have reviewed the limited available evidence concerning performance deltas between Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the AMD Ryzen CPU,” Hallock wrote. “We do not believe there is an issue with scheduling differences between the two versions of Windows. Any differences in performance can be more likely attributed to software architecture differences between these OSes.”

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