14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s recent patch for AMD Bulldozer processors was expected to bring a significant performance boost to CPUs using this architecture, but early tests seem to suggest that in most cases the “fix” doesn’t deliver any benefits to systems using it.
Soon after the patch was announced, SweClockers has started testing it to see how this performs in real life situations.
The publication ran a wide series of tests on a platform using the FX-8150 processor and more than half of these showed no performance boost after the patch was applied.
Furthermore, in some cases, the patch actually affected in a negative way the CPU’s performance, Metro 2033 running showing the worst scaling of the bunch with a 19.1% drop in the minimum frame rate recorded.
On the other hand, both the x264 Benchmark and Crysis 2 720p showed a significant improvement in performance, the latter topping out at 12% over the previous score.
The Windows 7 performance patch for AMD Bulldozer carries the KB2592546 designation and at least in theory it should better organize the threads run by the operating system for the shared architecture used by the Bulldozer cores.
Furthermore, the patch should also have an effect on the chip’s use of Turbo Core since it should increase the number of times that this dynamic overclocking technology kicks in.
Sadly, all these changes don’t seem to help Bulldozer all that much in real life scenarios, so AMD still has to find some new ways to increase the performance of this new architecture.
Before signing off, it’s important to mention that for some unknown reason, Microsoft has decided to remove the download links for the KB2592546 patch, even though its information page is still available.
UPDATE: As some of our readers have pointed out, this hotfix was pushed out prematurely by Microsoft as the patch also includes a second part which wasn’t made available at the time when these tests were run.
This means that the test results published by SweClockers don’t reflect the final performance of AMD’s Bulldozer CPUs with the patch applied.
