AMD Ryzen Multithreading Now Faster With Kernel 4.10 Support; Performance Not Affected By Reported Windows 10 Scheduler

The AMD Ryzen multithreading performance is now optimized with the added fix of the Linux Kernel 4.10 version to give Ryzen-powered Linux workstations the needed boost. Moreover, AMD's Robert Hallock revealed some interesting Ryzen updates dispelling previously reported and widely circulating Windows 10 scheduling issue that negatively affects Ryzen's performance.

It appears that the Linux Kernel 4.10 also has something to offer the red team as it previously offered a fix to Intel's Kaby Lake processors specifically on its turbo speeds. Now the new version fully capitalizes on all the threads of the AMD Ryzen CPUs where the kernel identifies the cores correctly. In so doing, AMD's Zen architecture is able to fully offer all its cores to the Linux kernel. This new fix is actually the third in a series of three different commits or code changes to the different architecture of AMD.

The first Kernel 4.0 fix for January was focused on Bulldozer-based CPUs wherein every core is giving its own identifier while earlier code considered each thread as if it is its own core. This resulted in latency wherein thread siblings are not correctly paired to a physical core. In so doing, efficiency is compromised since threads had to go to an inconvenient core to fetch resources when an easier one is available, PC World reported. A February commit to the AMD Ryzen reverted back the code while adding a new one to assign threads to a core with the proper pair thereby making multithreading faster and reducing latency.

The new Linux Kernel 4.10 commit to the AMD Ryzen now offers a fix that checks if the CPU belongs to the Zen architecture. This is then followed by dividing the number of reported cores or threads by the number of siblings per compute unit. This is done to ascertain the real number of cores and enable Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) work with every thread found in the cores. This results in a much-improved multithreaded performance wherein Ryzen-powered Linux workstations will be able to encode files quicker and boosting overall workstation performance.

In another AMD Ryzen performance-related news, Hallock provided a much-needed update on a number of things including Windows 10 thread scheduling, improvements on SMT, Windows power settings and more as detailed here. Hallock on the Windows 10 Scheduler as adversely affecting Ryzen performance reviewed the topology lags that were generated by the Sysinternals Coreinfo utility. He discovered that an outdated version of the app was used that incorrectly gave the wrong topology data. Hillock asserts that AMD Ryzen works just fine with no scheduling issues in Windows 7 to 10, PC Perspective reported.