AMD says Windows 11 performance boost is coming soon to its Ryzen 7000X3D, and possibly more

Update: New Ryzen chipset drivers meant to boost the performance are beginning to arrive, however, they are not publicly announced by AMD yet.

Back at Intel's Architecture Day 2021 event, when the Santa Clara company shared the core design details of its Alder Lake CPU architecture, the firm stated that Windows 11 was optimized in a way to best take advantage of the Alder Lake's Performance Hybrid architecture and the new Thread Director technology that helps Windows 11 task scheduling.

Performance data, including the most recent one, shows it is more of a mixed bag as Windows 11 22H2 and Windows 10 22H2 were seen trading blows with one another depending on the workload. The delta is probably not enough for someone to consider upgrading to Windows 11 as it is almost always less than 10%.

However, things could be vastly different for AMD with its new Ryzen 70003D chips that were revealed earlier today at CES 2023. While AMD debuted the 3D V-cache last year with the 8-core 5800X3D, the company is now moving beyond 8 cores with 12-core and 16-core options. Interestingly, the core layout is vastly different for the 8-core and 12/16-core variants. AMD employs a Core Complex Die (CCD) approach on the latter where each CCD packs up to eight cores. Hence for the 12 core, it's six cores in each CCD, and for the 16 core, it's all eight cores in each CCD.

Although the CCDs in normal Ryzen processors are duplicates, on the new Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs, AMD will only equip one CCD with the 64MB 3D V-cache. This means the other CCD will be geared towards high clock speeds. AMD's Scott Stankard shared this detail in an interview with PCWorld today. This approach will allow the 7000X3D chips to tackle both high cache usage cases, such as in games and stuff, as well as high clock speed scenarios.

The trade-off, AMD explains, is worth it as going with V-cache on both CCDs did not yield much better results and mainly added to the cost.

However, to make this possible, AMD says it had to work with Microsoft and game developers. Since only one CCD will have the 3D V-cache goodness, the task scheduling needs to be on point such that a particular workload is sent to its intended CCD for processing.

Scott Stankard explains:

I once called it magic, but it's not magic, it's hard work right, that we've done within our engineering team, with Microsoft, with the gaming developers such that we know which CCD to use at the right time

Although AMD does not explicitly mention Windows 11, it is almost certain these optimizations will make their way to Windows 11 and future versions. Windows 10 could get these optimizations as well.

The new scheduler update could also help alleviate CCD-related performance problems that have seemingly been plaguing AMD Ryzen CPUs on Windows 11 22H2.

Source: PCWorld (YouTube)