Oy, hang on a minute! Weren’t issues like these supposed to be mended during the testing phase of the new OS? Apparently, this one concerning AMD Ryzen CPUs got away.
Windows 11 is now available for everybody — well mostly everybody, as the rollout went live last week.
But those fine folks who installed the new operating system on an AMD system were in for a rude surprise when they noticed a substantial slowdown in performance. And as it goes, they were not alone, as this quickly become a widespread issue.
So much so that Microsoft and AMD itself acknowledged that some computers running these processors suffer from reduced performance.
The chip giant actually put up a support document detailing this, confirming that the downturn in performance of these chips is due to two different problems in how the processors and the operating system handle things.
First up, the measured and functional L3 cache latency can increase approximately three times. What this means is that applications that are sensitive to memory subsystem access time are impacted to the tune of 3-5%, and in some cases, 10-15% in games commonly used for esports.
And then we have the second glitch that concerns UEFI CPPC2 that may not preferentially schedule threads on the fastest core of said processor. Performance impact is more detectable in CPUs with more than 8-cores that operate above 65W TDP.
Apparently, the issue affects all AMD processors that are supported by Windows 11, including Ryzen, EPYC, even Athlon branded chips.
Luckily, Microsoft and AMD are aware of these problems, and work is already underway to fix them.
Despite Windows 11 being considered ready for public use, the new operating system is being rolled out in waves to users so problems like this can be detected early on before everybody is upgraded and starts juggling with these issues on their devices.
AMD owners suffering from these issues should receive a patch via Windows Update later this month.
