AMD Ryzen Community update #3: AMD Balanced Power in Windows

[WMGroomAK]

I originally noticed this article over at PCPer and AMD has now released their third Ryzen community update, which includes their own version of a Ryzen optimized Power Plan for Windows.  Accordint to the PCPer article, one of the issues that Windows Power Management has been having with the Ryzen chips consists of: 

(https://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/AMD-Releases-Ryzen-Balanced-Power-Plan-Test-Results-Inside).  

Quote

After we determined that the Windows 10 Scheduler was not at fault for the Ryzen performance issues we were seeing in some applications, we received some testing feedback from those who had noted performance differences between Windows 7 and Windows 10. While many believed that to be confirmation of scheduler differences between both Operating Systems, the actual cause was down to how Windows 7 and Windows 10 park their cores, as demonstrated by the points AMD sent us earlier today:

• Windows 7 only parks SMT cores, keeping all physical cores awake.
• Windows 10 keeps the first core awake (logical core 0 + 1 on a HT system) and parks the remainder when possible.
• Windows 10 disables core parking by default on Intel CPUs (Speed Shift support).

Since Windows power management (not the scheduler) is not yet Ryzen aware, its default settings result in overly aggressive core parking when driving a Ryzen CPU. Until a lower level change can take place, AMD has released a custom Ryzen Balanced Power Plan that tweaks some of the P-state transition values and a few other settings to help realize the performance gains previously seen by folks shifting to the High Performance mode while keeping idle power consumption much closer to that of the Balanced plan

The guys over at PCPer tried to deconstruct what exact changes have been made in order to create the AMD Balanced Power Plan over the High Performance Plan and created the following chart (Note: Units differ varying by parameter in this chart - compare within each set of 3 bars):

 

In addition to this, AMD is reporting a performance update in Total War: Warhammer with the Bretonnia Update released on March 27th.  

 

In the final part of the community update, they have an update coming out for the Ryzen Master software that will report the junction temps for the CPU rather than the tCTL temps by removing the tCTL offset that is applied on the 1800X, 1700X and 1600X processors:

https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/04/06/amd-ryzen-community-update-3

Tech Report Article: http://techreport.com/news/31710/amd-offers-a-power-plan-in-its-third-ryzen-community-update

 

Of these updates, it is good to see that they will hopefully have something in place in Windows for the Power Management and Core Parking issue that has been occurring.  Of course, it would have been better had these things not been needed in the first place. 

[Nowak]

19 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

It’s pretty beyond me why this is even a thing for the end user to deal with. As far as I can tell, the Linux kernel handles all of that stuff totally hands-free – seems pretty pointless to make it a feature of the power management interface. Is anyone going to want to have their Ryzen CPU performing poorly for no benefit whatsoever? I think not.

Maybe some people want control over power management.

[ARikozuM]

So, everyone has to take back their qualms about Windows 10 being "an unoptimized piece of $h!t"? 

 

Also, it's nice to see that AMD is making a very conscious and speedy effort to get Ryzen to where it should be.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Nicholatian said:

Maybe some people want poorer performance out of a power plan for no reason whatsoever. Personally, I think it’s fuckin pointless. lol

If you're not doing anything, why bother sending full power to the CPU for zero gain?

[Zodiark1593]

17 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

If you're not doing anything, why bother sending full power to the CPU for zero gain?

Agreed. The system runs quieter, fans hardly spin up, less dust gets sucked in meaning less maintenance over time, etc. For that matter, many video cards do not even have their fans spinning under low loads. 

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Agreed. The system runs quieter, fans hardly spin up, less dust gets sucked in meaning less maintenance over time, etc. For that matter, many video cards do not even have their fans spinning under low loads. 

hello, under light load, my rx 480 from MSI doesnt even spin at all. Only starts at 65°

[Tam3n]

Minimum processor state at 90 %

 

Anyway, if you are a control freak, you can unhide all processor power management settings in registry:

[DrMikeNZ]

9 hours ago, Nicholatian said:

Maybe some people want poorer performance out of a power plan for no reason whatsoever. Personally, I think it’s fuckin pointless. lol

When the power goes out, my CPU drops clock speed by about 10%, this significantly reduces power consumption extending backup time on battery. Anything to prevent the workload from failing and having to be restarted from the beginning. Being able to control these settings for optimum performance or efficiency is very useful.

[Morgan MLGman]

10 hours ago, Nicholatian said:

It’s pretty beyond me why this is even a thing for the end user to deal with. As far as I can tell, the Linux kernel handles all of that stuff totally hands-free – seems pretty pointless to make it a feature of the power management interface. Is anyone going to want to have their Ryzen CPU performing poorly for no benefit whatsoever? I think not.

I think you didn't notice the important part here:

Quote

Until a lower level change can take place, AMD has released a custom Ryzen Balanced Power Plan

Meaning implementing a permanent fix through a BIOS update.

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I think you didn't notice the important part here:

Meaning implementing a permanent fix through a BIOS update.

Sounds more like a Windows update is necessary. They say Windows is parking cores aggressively. Their fix seems to override Windows manually by messing with the power plan. It seems Windows already does this automatically on Intel processors in order to make Speedshift work. Windows defers core control to the chip for Skylake and up but doesn't for Ryzen it seems.

[Morgan MLGman]

5 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Sounds more like a Windows update is necessary. They say Windows is parking cores aggressively. Their fix seems to override Windows manually by messing with the power plan. It seems Windows already does this automatically on Intel processors in order to make Speedshift work. Windows defers core control to the chip for Skylake and up but doesn't for Ryzen it seems.

Not necessarily. Power plan issue most likely exists because of AMD's brand-new SenseMi technology in Ryzen CPUs which is a very advanced power management built-in tool (and the reason the R7 lineup draws such a small amount of power compared to Intel chips - the 1800X draws less during gaming than a 7700K while having double the cores and threads)

 

My guess is - SenseMi has issues with current Windows 10 power management settings, if it gets adjusted through a BIOS update then original W10 power plans should work as intended.

 

This is only my guess, but considering AMD themselves mentioned a "lower level" change than a software one - it seems possible.

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Not necessarily. Power plan issue most likely exists because of AMD's brand-new SenseMi technology in Ryzen CPUs which is a very advanced power management built-in tool (and the reason the R7 lineup draws such a small amount of power compared to Intel chips - the 1800X draws less during gaming than a 7700K while having double the cores and threads)

 

My guess is - SenseMi has issues with current Windows 10 power management settings, if it gets adjusted through a BIOS update then original W10 power plans should work as intended.

 

This is only my guess, but considering AMD themselves mentioned a "lower level" change than a software one - it seems possible.

Lower level does not necessarily mean BIOS. It's a vague statement. If a BIOS update is necessary then that would indicate a problem with the CPU or motherboard itself which does not seem to be the case. It seems Windows power management is at fault. If I were to guess AMD issued a temporary solution in user space where a permanent solution requires changes to the kernel or similar 'low level'. As the OP says this has already been done for Intel. I don't recall Intel releasing a BIOS update to enable Speedshift but a Windows update did. In any case it kinda seems like AMD has their hands tied in the sense that they can't just fix this on their own unless it was a time constrained hotfix.

[Morgan MLGman]

1 minute ago, Trixanity said:

Lower level does not necessarily mean BIOS. It's a vague statement. If a BIOS update is necessary then that would indicate a problem with the CPU or motherboard itself which does not seem to be the case. It seems Windows power management is at fault. If I were to guess AMD issued a temporary solution in user space where a permanent solution requires changes to the kernel or similar 'low level'. As the OP says this has already been done for Intel. I don't recall Intel releasing a BIOS update to enable Speedshift but a Windows update did. In any case it kinda seems like AMD has their hands tied in the sense that they can't just fix this on their own unless it was a time constrained hotfix.

I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean the BIOS, I also didn't mean BIOS as in BIOS but a microcode (AGESA) update that rolls out along with a BIOS update as there's no other way to implement it.

 

I believe it's gonna be through a microcode update because SenseMi is a feature that's built-in into the CPU physically, it's not a software solution:

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/sense-mi

As the technology is brand-new, there might be issues with it and that might very well be one of them. Though I guess it could be possible to roll out a Windows update that just natively uses the Ryzen-optimized power plan as the "Balanced" one in Windows if a Ryzen CPU is present in the system as well.

 

One way or another, it's probably not a very hard thing to fix for them

[Trixanity]

2 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean the BIOS, I also didn't mean BIOS as in BIOS but a microcode (AGESA) update that rolls out along with a BIOS update as there's no other way to implement it.

 

I believe it's gonna be through a microcode update because SenseMi is a feature that's built-in into the CPU physically, it's not a software solution:

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/sense-mi

As the technology is brand-new, there might be issues with it and that might very well be one of them. Though I guess it could be possible to roll out a Windows update that just natively uses the Ryzen-optimized power plan as the "Balanced" one in Windows if a Ryzen CPU is present in the system as well.

 

One way or another, it's probably not a very hard thing to fix for them

I know about sensemi. My point was that it's already integrated at the chip level. So unless it's not working as intended then microcode shouldn't be necessary. It seems Windows cripples sensemi like it did Speedshift. It's parking cores it shouldn't. It needs to defer to the chip but doesn't because those things have been the operating system's domain for years. This is a paradigm shift. Either way we'll eventually find out how AMD fixes it :-)

[TOMPPIX]

4 hours ago, Tam3n said:

Minimum processor state at 90 %

 

Anyway, if you are a control freak, you can unhide all processor power management settings in registry:

got a .reg file for the tweaks? nevermind.

[Doobeedoo]

Neat. Good until it's rolled out in chipset driver package.