AMD's Ryzen CPUs have been found to lock up on certain workloads

Published: 16th March 2017 | Source: PCPER | Author: Mark Campbell

One week ago a thread on the HWBot forums, where users were reporting that certain workloads were causing systems to hard lock every time it was run. Over time this was tested by other Ryzen users on multiple motherboards, finding that this issue affected all systems that were using Ryzen's default power and clock settings, but that some overclocked systems were proving stable.

This only affected very specific FMA3 instructions on a Haswell-e optimised version of Flops version 2, a program that has individually optimised binaries for Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge, Haswell and Skylake, effectively every major X64 architecture with the exception of Zen/Ryzen.

AMD has confirmed that this is an issue, but also that it is fixable using a motherboard firmware update. Right now this issue is seemed to be caused by a power management issue with the CPU's FPU, which explains why some overclocked systems (which use more power) are able to handle this workload. This means that this Ryzen issue should be fixable in time.

AMD's Ryzen CPUs have been found to lock up on certain workloads

The only problem that this update may cause is that Ryzen CPUs will either consume slightly more power under this specific load after the firmware update or that AMD's Ryzen CPUs will push more power into the FPU and use slightly lower burst/boost clock speeds when under these loads to conserve power. This is a minor issue given the fact that this will allow Ryzen to function under these workloads, especially given the fact that any update should not affect Ryzen outside of these specific workloads.

This is a highly specific workload that will not affect many consumers, though it is great to see AMD quickly respond to the issue and are actively working on a fix for the problem.

You can join the discussion on Ryzen's issues with specific FMA3 workloads on the OC3D Forums.

Most Recent Comments

16-03-2017, 14:55:50

NeverBackDown

I wonder if it is causing a deadlock on a CPU level or if it is just a bug in firmwareQuote

16-03-2017, 14:58:30

WYP

Quote:

Originally Posted by NeverBackDown

I wonder if it is causing a deadlock on a CPU level or if it is just a bug in firmware

The issue seems to be related to power management, which is something that can be fixed in firmware.Quote

16-03-2017, 15:03:58

NeverBackDown

I would bet you are right. If it was an actual deadlock that would be very bad. Very hard to fix that.Quote

AMD's Ryzen CPUs have been found to lock up on certain workloads