AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 Performance With The Ryzen 9 9950X On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 Performance With The Ryzen 9 9950X On Linux

There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-9950x-agesa-1202

[chuckula]

Good review and this looks like a situation where the decision to upgrade AGESA (or not) is really based on the workloads that are most important to you since there are clear winners & losers for both versions.

[Errinwright]

Any impact on gaming?

[user556]

Does anyone know what the specific trade-off is? Improved inter-core latency must have been traded for something else.

[raystriker]

Hopefully the production version of this bios or its successor is able to produce 0 regressions. All eyes on AMD this October.

[milkylainen]

I wonder if any AGESA is going to help improve the 7000-series RAM situation.
It's still pretty finicky. The new 9000-series seems to fair a bit better imho.

[qarium]

Good review and this looks like a situation where the decision to upgrade AGESA (or not) is really based on the workloads that are most important to you since there are clear winners & losers for both versions.

you unterstand that the bios update was mainly for windows ... not linux...

linux did show very good performance with ryzen9000 from the start.. it was windows with disastrous performance for games and other apps.

[chuckula]

you unterstand that the bios update was mainly for windows ... not linux...

linux did show very good performance with ryzen9000 from the start.. it was windows with disastrous performance for games and other apps.

That's flat out wrong and shows your technical ignorance. The fixes in AGESA had nothing to do with any operating system whatsoever. They were instead addressing the very anemic (as in slower than Zen 1) latencies between CCDs. This is a well documented phenomenon that the chip didn't magically turn on & off due to the operating system being used.

Windows had issues with extra memory protection being turned on that slowed it down and it is a slower OS in general, but on a relative basis it should have seen a much bigger boost from Zen 5 too. The issue is that many Windows reviews are not focused on running software workloads where lots of cores just run independent chunks of a workload in parallel, which is the majority of PTS. Instead, they ran things like games that thrash the cache and actually stress inter-core communication. That's where the bugs in in the I/O die that created atrocious latencies really reared their heads. After the fixes are in, the latency numbers are now just about the same as Zen 4, which makes sense since the I/O die was recycled.

In your 8th grade eagerness to trash Windows -- while not understanding that different workloads will us cache differently regardless of OS -- you also failed to "disprove" anything I said. A smart Linux admin will judiciously look at these performance figures before blindly applying an update.

[Danny3]

It would be great if newer Agesa would improve the performance on older Ryzens too!

[qarium]

It would be great if newer Agesa would improve the performance on older Ryzens too!

this performance upgrade by AGESA update was only possible because the now forever gone anandtech.com website found this memory latency bug see their last article:

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

no one else as far as i can say of the testers and reviewers of the hardware had the technical skill to find this bug.

quality journalism like anandtech.com is not even possible anymore thats why they closed the website forever.