AMD Ryzen 7 2700x - Verified 15% performance decrease

iphorde · October 1, 2018

AMD has introduced a performance penalty in their latest update to their AGESA 1.0.0.4 Microcode. This update decreases the multi-threaded performance of the CPU by more than 15%.

I have been in contact with Gigabyte and they acknowledged the problem and were able to reproduce the results as well. The performance decrease can be noticed using real world applications and synthetic benchmarks such as Passmark's PerformanceTest.

Gigabyte said they would be contacting AMD about the issue.

I have since tested this on two other motherboard manufactures and found the same result. Could someone test the Ryzen 5 2600x and see if this penalty exists there as well?

My guess at the moment is a variant of Spectre flaw was patched and has critically hindered the performance and AMD just silently didn't tell anyone.

Be warned for anyone buying the Ryzen 7 2700x and getting the expected performance that has been reported in the past. This patch has hit the overall performance of the CPU.

Princess Luna · October 1, 2018

If it was Intel this would be all over the news section....

neitzches-pctech · October 1, 2018

That is because we come to expect this from AMD and with Intel its rare AF

iphorde · October 1, 2018

I moved off Intel over to AMD because of the issue I was having with my i7-6700k and their meltdown/spectre updates. This was a bad move now for me. The performance difference wasn't worth the move, given AMD has introduced an even more severe penality. I bought several of those CPU's and boards.

It looks likes Spectre/Meltdown will haunt the industry for years to come.

You can't trust initial benchmarks anymore. AMD and Intel appear to release the product with a firmware that lets the CPU seem fast, but then hamper it later. I'm beginning to think this needs to be reported to Federal Government Law Enforcement for investigation. This is exactly the same behavior Volkswagen exhibited with their cars.