Finally, the long-awaited patches for performance problems by Microsoft and AMD to solve the problems that arose in AMD Ryzen processors when running Windows 11 are now available to the general public. This is very good news, as the performance cut was considerable to the point where the manufacturer itself recommended not updating to the new Redmond operating system.
The performance problems of the AMD Ryzen under Windows 11 are actually two different problems, the first of them is the known one of the latency of the third level cache and the second has to do the allocation of the processes to the preferred cores. So we are talking about two different problems that have been solved from two different perspectives and hence there is a patch from AMD and another from Microsoft.
Why did the AMD Ryzen lose performance?
The first of the reasons is the fault of AMD itself, specifically the drivers of its chipsets that made the processes not be distributed to the correct cores. It must be taken into account that despite the fact that Zen architectures are homogeneous, since the cores are symmetrical, there are always one or two cores that are faster as they have a higher clock speed and therefore it is where the most processes are assigned, heavy by the operating system.
The other problem has to do with the performance of the L3 cache, where the latency, which is the time it takes for the execution units to communicate with this L3, had tripled in all generations of AMD Ryzen. Keep in mind that the CPUs will first look for the data and instructions in the cache hierarchy, since finding them sooner means solving the instruction in less time.
Where to download the patches?
The first of them is the update of October 21, 2021 for Windows 11, which if you are users of the operating system, it should be installed if you have automatic installations activated. If you manually look for the update, it is KB5006746 (OS Build 22000.282) and this is used to solve the problem of the third level cache. To install it you just have to go to settings → update and security → Windows Update. You will see it in the optional updates available section, there you will find the link to download and install the patch.
The second patch comes from AMD itself and serves to solve the problem of the preferred core, it comes in the update of the drivers for the AMD Chipset, version 3.10.08.506,which you can download at the following link. Both patches will allow you to make use of Microsoft’s new operating system with all the power of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs.
