It looks like an answer has appeared for the dilemma that Microsoft gave birth to when it launched a Bulldozer patch and subsequently yanked it from its website.
By now, many people, especially buyers of one of the AMD Bulldozer central processing units, are likely experiencing something resembling mild befuddlement.
Looks like AMD ended up being the one to actually explain what happened on Microsoft's end yesterday, when the Bulldozer patch showed up.
To review known facts, about a day ago Microsoft
posted a patch that was supposed to offer support for SMT, a technology that AMD Bulldozer introduced.
Short for simultaneous multi-threading, the SMT technology is not supported by any operating system, hence the underwhelming performance in reviews.
Microsoft described the hotfix as the means to bring the 8-core chips to the level of performance they were supposed to show.
Alas, not even 24 hours after the download package went online, the hotfix
mysteriously disappeared from its download page.
Fortunately, Advanced Micro Devices reportedly
responded to prodding about the matter.
Oddly though, it was about as surprised as everyone else, only not about the disappearance but by the patch showing up in the first place.
"There are actually two updates needed for AMD Bulldozer CPU architecture,” the company reportedly said.
“Microsoft posted just the first patch and we do not believe users would benefit in any way from it. The patch was originally scheduled for the first quarter 2012 and then the users will see tangible performance benefits when using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.”
In other words, there definitely is a patch (or two) in the works, but they aren't supposed to be made public before next year.
The few people who downloaded this incomplete one might, thus, want to consider totally uninstalling it and even purging their systems of the downloaded file for good measure.
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