AMD Busts Ryzen Performance Myths, Clearing Windows 10 From Blame

- Gordon Mah Ung

RYZEN PERFORMANCE IS the mystery that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories, performing like a champ (go.pcworld.com/ryzenrev) in productivity and content creation tasks but occasionally delivering fewer frames than you’d expect in games. AMD debunked most of those conspiracy theories in a recent blog post (go.pcworld.com/ryzenblog).

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.”