10 PCWorld JULY 2019NEWS AMD RYZEN 9 3950X
a whopping 70MB of cache. That all adds up
to a sizeable boost in gaming performance,
especially at lower resolutions, AMD said.MAYBE THE WINDOWS
WAS BROKEN AFTER ALL?
One other advance for Ryzen 3000 (and
perhaps all Ryzen chips) are new
“optimizations” from Microsoft. When the
original Ryzen was
released, some of the
performance, especially in
gaming, was baffling. It
didn’t take long for many
to suspect that Windows
10 just didn’t know what to
do with the multi-die
package of the chip—
specifically, how Windows
10’s scheduler dispatched
work to the CPU cores.
Many believed Windows10 was willy-nilly
sending work to
cores on a different
chip rather than the
same chip—even if
a CPU core was free
on the same chip.
(At the time, AMD
actually came out
and absolved (go.
pcworld.com/bust)
Microsoft Windows
10 of any blame. But, frankly, it never rang true
to us.)
As of the Windows 10 May 2019 Update,
AMD said optimizations to the operating
system will dispatch work to adjacent cores
on the same die first, which will greatly
reduce latency. AMD also said the May 2019
Update will bring faster clock ramping in its
chips. With previous builds of Windows,Windows 10 “optimizations” sound an awful lot like a fixed scheduler.