Owners of AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs will be delighted to hear that they will be getting another free performance boost, but this time the patch, by way of an AGESA BIOS update will not also improve performance of the Ryzen 7000 series.
The new update with version number 1.2.0.2 is already available for specific Asus motherboards, but should be rolled out with more soon. It focussed on improving inter-core latency, which according to tests made in reviews at Ryzen 9000’s launch a few weeks ago, were rather high compared to similar models of the previous Ryzen 7000 generation.
The improvements as measured by Overclock.net forum member domdtxdissar (via Videocardz)and by website HardwareLuxx, show a significant drop in inter-core latency – that is the time it takes for two cores to communicate with each other. This fell from around 180ns to just 75ns with the new BIOS update according to the Overclock.net post and HardwareLuxx revealed similar results, with 200ns down to 95ns.
Of course, latency reduction is all very well, but how does this impact real world performance? The results aren’t quite as dramatic, but still measurable according to a source on Anandtech who was quick to test both old and new BIOS versions. However, the Cinebench R23 score boost of 400-600 points was only around one percent.
The new Ryzen 9000 series hasn’t had an easy launch, first being delayed why a rumored headspreader typo, then with reviewers finding issues with performance, some of which were later found to be due to Windows 11 problems. These were then found to be fixed in a future 24H2 Windows 11 update that at the time was only available to those on the Windows Insiders program.
This update was then dramatically brought forwards by Microsoft and released publicly to the current version 23H2, which could be downloaded as Windows 11 Update KB5041587.
With constantly shifting goal posts, these updates made hardware reviewer’s lives very difficult with constant retesting, and the latest update is yet another fix that many view should have been noticed and fixed prior to the Ryzen 9000 launch.
According to Digital Trends, AMD’s Ryzen 9000 launch has been met with poor sales, and many reviewers pointed at lower Ryzen 7000 pricing making those CPUs better buys. So much so that some popular models such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D actually went up in price. All eyes, then, are now on its Ryzen 9000 X3D models with their game-performance boosting 3D V-Cache to turn around Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5’s fortunes. It’s also suspected that the performance differences between Ryzen 9000 and the X3D models outside of games could be lower than ever, making them even more attractive to casual gamers as well as hard core ones.
AMD will also be releasing its X870 chipset later this month, with new motherboards potentially spurring new demand for Socket AM5 processors and these will be coming from the usual manufacturers such ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI with more offering features such as USB 4, Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 5.
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