AMD details AGESA update for Ryzen, Hits AM4 motherboards in early April
Last week, we reported that AMD is readying to push a new AGESA update to its motherboard partners. The company just detailed this significant update, revealing how it could help gamers to squeeze more performance out of their Ryzen PCs. Its tweaks are expected to be available to users via AM4 motherboard BIOS updates in early April.
AGESA is short for AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture, which is defined as a “nucleus” for the Ryzen motherboard BIOSes for initializing x86-64 processors during boot time. AMD’s Head of Global Technical Marketing, Robert Hallock, detailed the AGESA update yesterday in the company’s latest Ryzen community update.
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Below are the four improvements that BIOSes based on this new code are expected to offer, as per Hallock’s post:
- We have reduced DRAM latency by approximately 6ns. This can result in higher performance for latency-sensitive applications.
- We resolved a condition where an unusual FMA3 code sequence could cause a system hang.
- We resolved the “overclock sleep bug” where an incorrect CPU frequency could be reported after resuming from S3 sleep.
- AMD Ryzen™ Master no longer requires the High-Precision Event Timer (HPET).
Having AMD’s Ryzen Master OC software dependent upon HPET was bit of a setback for users that wanted to overclock their systems. In this regard, the last bullet point is especially notable as gamers will now be able to disable HPET and achieve the best of Ryzen PC performance.
Apart from AGESA, AMD has another update coming out in April that will improve the way Ryzen responds to Windows 10’s Balanced power plan. Then, in May, updates regarding high-speed RAM are planned. These would enable AM4 motherboards “to support speeds higher than the current DDR4-3200 limit without refclk [reference clock] adjustments.”
The Ryzen CPUs already offer the same multi-thread performance as Intel’s Extreme Edition chips for a fraction of the price. However, the AM4 motherboard platform is still in its infancy, so there are some rough edges that are to be ironed out over time. We hope the new BIOS updates would improve performance, especially in gaming tasks, where it is said to be less than expected.
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