Microsoft releases performance fix for Bulldozer chips again

Microsoft has released another patch to improve the performance of AMD’s Bulldozer processors. The patch ensures that the Windows scheduler handles the different cores of the CPU better.

The two patches affect how the different cores are used. The Bulldozer chips have four modules, each with two cores, which, for example, share L2 cache. If not all eight cores are used, it is better to use a single core of each module, which then has access to the full amount of L2 cache, among other things. The first patch from Microsoft responds to this and AMD claims in some tests a performance gain of ten percent.

The second patch has to do with power management. Windows 7 would sometimes tell cores to go to sleep when they can actually still do useful work. The patch should therefore prevent cores from being disabled prematurely and should thus provide performance gains.

Whether this affects energy consumption is not entirely clear. It may make Bulldozer CPUs faster, but there is a chance that this will come at the cost of energy efficiency. Microsoft also released a patch earlier, but the impact on performance was negligible in most cases; in some cases, Bulldozer CPU performance even deteriorated.