When AMD announced its Ryzen 9000 series desktop processor lineup at Computex earlier this year, the company touted big performance gains thanks to a massive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) boost.
Curiously though, those claims did not quite materialize in the case of third-party reviews and AMD pointed out that there could be bugs at play demonstrating how Windows Account privileges could be affecting performance using Windows' hidden Admin account.
AMD later explained that appropriate branch prediction optimizations were missing in Windows 11 that were necessary for getting the best out of Ryzen, and especially Ryzen 9000 series CPUs. This may well explain the superior performance Linux enjoyed against Microsoft's desktop OS.
As promised by the Redmond giant, the patch definitely improved performance pretty significantly, by an average of approximately 10% in games, which is praiseworthy. However, mileage may greatly vary as it was also found that Windows could literally be performing differently in one installation versus another even though both may be perfectly clean installs, highlighting the inconsistency of performance on Windows.
Besides the branch prediction optimization patch, firmware was also released that raised the TDP of Ryzen 9000 series from 65 watt up to 105 watt. MSI told users to expect up to 13% performance boost thanks to the additional power headroom and clock speed.
Aside from the 105 watt TDP firmware, AMD was also working on a new firmware to address latency issues on Zen 5 (Ryzen 9000) series processors. This high core-to-core latency has been fixed on the Windows side of things per the latest AGESA (AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture) PI (Platform Initialization) 1.2.0.1A firmware update.
Tech outlet Phoronix tested the new 1.2.0.1A / 1.2.0.2 AGESA firmware on Linux and the performance was found to be generally better on a Ryzen 9950X with the new BIOS compared to the older one. The outlet noted that the geometric mean of the two OS was within the margin of error but, individual tests do reveal bigger differences in one's favor over the other. The site notes:
So for a limited number of benchmarks there were changes to find in performance but from all 385 benchmarks in total overall the performance was rather flat for performance and no measurable difference in CPU power consumption. Then again, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X performance under Linux with a wide variety of workloads has been performing great already since launch day.
You can find the full test data on Phoronix's website here.
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