Coreprio Utility Doubles Threadripper 2990WX Performance in Some Scenarios
Coreprio Utility Doubles Threadripper 2990WX Performance in Some Scenarios
While Threadripper’s raw CPU grunt is colossal, problems arise when trying to utilise that performance in some everyday situations. In some cases, AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX and 2970WX offer sub-optimal performance, even when compared to AMD’s 16-core and 12-core Threadripper designs. Strangely, many of these issues appear to only be present within Windows, with many affected applications performing better under Linux than Microsoft’s latest OS.
This prompted a lot of rumours about the cause of the issue, from a bug in the Windows kernel to memory bandwidth limitations and AMD’s multi-die design. Now, thanks to a lengthy investigation from Level1Techs, we now know what causes the issue and have an (experimental) solution to the problem.
Windows doesn’t do a great job allocating work to AMD’s Threadripper 2970WX and 2990WX processors, creating a situation where all cores are fully loaded, but much of that work isn’t focused on completing the task at hand. Resulting in AMD’s 32-core processor offering less performance than its 16-core counterpart in benchmarks like Indigo and 7zip. As it turns out, Windows is allocating these benchmarks a list of “ideal cores” which turn out to be less than ideal, resulting in insane performance regressions. Changing the CPU’s core affinity after a new workload begins mitigates this issue, only after the workload begins, application-based affinity changes (before the workload starts) have no performance impact.
To help solve Threadripper’s performance woes on Windows, Level1Tech’s has modified the Coreprio utility to help Ryzen Threadripper WX users to gain extra performance in affected workloads, resulting in 7-zip scores increasing from around 41,000 MIPS to 70,000 MIPS, a 70% increase. Performance almost doubles when this fix is used with Indigo.
What Level1Tech’s investigation has confirmed is that the performance issues with AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper WX series on Windows is a problem that stems from the Windows kernel, not AMD’s design, not memory bandwidth and not the Windows versions of the affected software. Now that this information has come to light, Microsoft needs to address this issue, as it needlessly handicaps some of the world’s most powerful consumer processors and gives PC users another reason to try out Linux.
A full deep dive into Level1Tech’s investigation is available to read here (video here). CorePrio and the app’s performance fixing “NUMA Disassociation” mode is available to download on Bitsum.
You can join the discussion on Coreprio doubling the Threadripper 2990WX’s performance in certain scenarios on the OC3D Forums.