Did Bulldozer just get better?

bulldozer

Remember the lacklustre performance of AMD's much vaunted new Bulldozer CPU architecture? Turns out the difficult launch and grilling the chip got in reviews may not have been entirely down to the limits of the hardware.

Launched as the AMD FX brand a month or so ago, Bulldozer performance was behind what most pundits were hoping for. Apparently, some of that is due to Windows not supporting new features that Bulldozer introduced. And now there's a patch that should help.

According to the patch release notes , the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature of Bulldozer isn't compatible with Windows threading logic. Which may have been hampering AMD's comparative performance in multithreaded tasks.

Bulldozer differs significantly from previous CPU designs in that it shares more resources between processing pipelines than traditional chips. For example, each 'core' of a Bulldozer chip has two integer processing units, and a single floating point unit. Thanks to this, AMD counts each 'Bulldozer module' as two traditional cores, so a three module chip is marketed as six core, four as eight and so on. Clearly things are a bit more complex than that both in terms of software as well as the hardware design.

In order to get hold of the patch, you'll have to apply it manually from here – it won't be appearing in Windows' auto-update for the time being. It actually appeared on Friday evening (UK time) after the office shut up – so if anyone's had chance to use it and discovered favourable results, please do let me know about it in the comments below. For various reasons, we've still not been able to get hold of a Bulldozer sample to review in the labs, so can't honestly report on what difference this patch makes. I'm not sure that improved scheduling will help many game frates, but it might well help.

Latest in Gaming Industry
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
A computer screen with program code warning of a detected malware script program. 3d illustration
Coder faces 10 years' jailtime for creating a 'kill switch' that screwed-up his employers' systems when he was laid off
Atomfall screenshot
Rebellion CEO puts the studio's recent avoidance of layoffs down to control of scope and cost: 'Sometimes we say, guys, this game's too big'
Judge Dredd promotional image in Warzone
Half-a-dozen 2000AD games were in the works before fizzling out: 'The games you get to see are a tiny representative of the number that get started—sadly'
sniper elite 5 cover
Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: 'You could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions'
Latest in Features
Screenshots from Half-Life 2 RTX, showing the various new effects delivered by full ray tracing and enhanced assets.
I just played Half-Life 2 RTX, a fully ray-traced overhaul of the original, and its meaty headcrabs have me hankering for more
In a world of WoW Classics and Old School RuneScapes… could Final Fantasy 14 ever do the same?
Honey B Lovely
The state of Final Fantasy 14 in 2025: It's in a weird spot, huh?
Monster Hunter Wilds palico
One of the biggest victories of Monster Hunter Wilds' streamlining is I don't have to deal with those awful gimmick fights anymore
A vampire with a dark castle and swarms of bats in the background.
We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
A gaming PC with RGB lighting enabled on a desk.
This gaming PC build smashes together the very latest components but if I did it again, I'd do it differently