AMD improves real-world boost and idle on Ryzen 3000

Enlarge / Too much boost is just enough. (credit: Universal Pictures)

Tuesday, AMD announced firmware updates for its new Ryzen 3000 desktop CPU line to improve both its highest boost clock speed and its willingness to "idle" at lower, more power-efficient speeds when the processor's full power is not required. The improvements are in the most recent beta reference firmware and are expected to filter down to OEM motherboard manufacturers and become available in about three weeks from now-subject, of course, to testing and implementation schedules of the OEMs.

The announcement also teases a new SDK launch targeted for September 30, which offers APIs for use in monitoring utilities.

Boosted boost

Last week, a survey of more than 3,000 Ryzen 3000 CPU owners showed that fewer than half of those CPUs were capable of hitting the maximum boost clock rate advertised. This really isn't the end of the world-a Ryzen 9 3900X that peaks at 4.5GHz instead of 4.6GHz is only missing out on 2% of its total possible boost clock rate, and even that 2% clock rate does not generally translate to 2% slower application performance. In other words, you're going to need artificial tests to discover the problem-you absolutely would not just suddenly realize, "hey, this isn't as fast as it ought to be!" in the middle of a gaming or content creation session.

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