AMD Reveals Latest Plans For Open-Source openSIL With Replacing AGESA, Zen 6 Milestone

[intelfx]

Bruh... If you want better gaming performance upgrade your GPU not your CPU. You should only be upgrading your CPU about every 4-5 year because it's been diminishing marginal returns since the 00s outside of fresh redesigns though the generational improvements stack up over time to being worth it. Most games are GPU bound not CPU and your GPU actually does receive regular significant performance improvements. generationally.

That highly depends on the games.

Most of my gaming is flight simulation, and believe me, this thing devours CPU time. Peak single-thread performance in presence of other threads makes the difference between barely playable 30fps and smooth 60fps.

[gustavoar]

Holding them back from playable or even good performance? No... No they're not. You can play everything just fine today on your Zen 4 CPU, as the owner of a 7950X and 7900 XTX I know... I do it, games that are actually heavy on the CPU like Star Citzen are getting in excess of 100FPS. Holding them back from getting 450FPS rather than 400 in situations where the GPU is the fast one? Sure but you don't benefit from that. You're just burning power by shooting out frames faster than a monitor can display them. Unless you're heavy into strategy or complex sim games you're probably not in a situation where CPU performance really matters. It's why the Playstation 4 got away with using literal wimpy netbook cores

That isn't to say that CPU performance is entirely irrelevant... for chasing high end games like Star Citizen and Cyberpunk you do need to upgrade every so often, but for a gamer chasing the CPU upgrade treadmill is the worst investment you can possibly make. If you're a content producer, a software developer or something it can make sense, but a gamer? lol no. If you're absolutely rolling in cash fine go ahead and keep up to date on the latest and greatest but if you aren't then run the GPU upgrade treadmill instead and leave full rebuilds to a 4-5 year cycle.

I never said that it will make things unplayable in most cases and that won't have a good experience. I meant that you could achieve better performance with a faster CPU.

[AmericanLocomotive]

Can anyone explain what exactly this will do?

I know at the most basic level AGESA is the first bit of code loaded that initializes the CPU cores, memory controller and defines CPU operating characteristics (voltages, clocks, timings of various components).

I get that openSIL is supposed to be the "next generation" version of AGESA, but what exactly is "open" about it? My assumption (based on what other companies have done), is that just the base code itself will be open, but all "values" that needed to be loaded into the CPU registers and cache (like actual CPU configuration stuff, microcode, voltage/frequency curves, whatever) is just going to be in an encrypted binary blob.

[isaacx123]

If you look at recent benchmarks and analysis from various parties, you will find that CPUs are holding the high end GPU performance back in many cases recently. So it's a mix of both.

Not if you play at (real)1440p and above.

[Luke_Wolf]

I never said that it will make things unplayable in most cases and that won't have a good experience. I meant that you could achieve better performance with a faster CPU.

Sure, but it's just not a wise financial choice vs the much larger gain you'll get with GPU upgrades. Unless you're making a big leap it'll always be for marginal gains.

[Scramblejams]

Can anyone explain what exactly this will do?

I've got similar questions. For example, passing the iGPU through to a VM hardly works, IOMMU groups are notoriously clumpy on these boards, and suspend-to-RAM doesn't seem to be 100% reliable. Will the access we get through this project allow the community to start solving those kinds of issues? etc etc

[Scramblejams]

Holding them back from playable or even good performance? No... No they're not. You can play everything just fine today on your Zen 4 CPU, as the owner of a 7950X and 7900 XTX I know...

Be careful with those generalizations! :-) As the owner of a 7950X3D and a 7900 XTX I can tell you that the CPU is what's killing me on MSFS and DCS, it ain't even close.

[qarium]

Awesome, my only concern with this is that if they introduce it in desktop Zen 6, it will mean that Zen 5 is that last AM5 generation. This would make me angry since I got a Zen 4 and was planning to upgrade to Zen 6 once it comes out, giving that Zen 5 is underwhelming for games.

you know that the bad game performance is a software bug right ? there was multible paches for windows.

also the last article of anandtech before the side closed forever was about the 9950x and 9900x release

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21524/the-amd-ryzen-9-9950x-and-ryzen-9-9900x-review

they found a cach bug in the microcode and AMD already said they will fix this slow-down cache bug with future microcode updates.

also think about the X3D cpus there will be a 9950X3D and 9900X3D and 9800X3D and maybe even 9600X3D

why do you want zen6 for gaming performance if the X3D cpus give you Gaming performance ?

[fitzie]

Awesome, my only concern with this is that if they introduce it in desktop Zen 6, it will mean that Zen 5 is that last AM5 generation. This would make me angry since I got a Zen 4 and was planning to upgrade to Zen 6 once it comes out, giving that Zen 5 is underwhelming for games.

no reason to read into this openSIL roadmap that aegsa will not support zen 6. there will probably be some overlap for at least one generation, if not more than that.

[Jedibeeftrix]

the suggestion is in the techpowerup article that zen6 client opensil will be limited to laptops and big-vendor desktops - where they have lots of control.