Friday, June 21st 2013
AMD Super Pi History To Be Rewritten, Courtesy The Stilt
AMD Super Pi History To Be Rewritten, Courtesy Of The Stilt
AMD's typically underwhelming Super PI performance, that was usually attributed to architectural limitations when it comes to the X87 instruction set, appears to have been nothing more than a blunder on the part of the developers responsible with BIOS development and optimization for AMD platforms. Finnish overclocker, The Stilt, figured out how to considerably improve performance by going through the BIOS developers guides. The exact same guides available to the BIOS R&D teams of motherboard vendors, a surprising fact considering a single man managed to outdo an entire industry. Here is the download link to the patch: click
The Stilt posted a video in which he showed a 4.1GHz A10-6800K completing SuperPI in 17 minutes and 34 seconds. The fastest 5GHz Richland SuperPI 32M is around 18 minutes and 15 seconds. A lot faster! For more information, check out the thread in the HWBot forums.
AMD's typically underwhelming Super PI performance, that was usually attributed to architectural limitations when it comes to the X87 instruction set, appears to have been nothing more than a blunder on the part of the developers responsible with BIOS development and optimization for AMD platforms. Finnish overclocker, The Stilt, figured out how to considerably improve performance by going through the BIOS developers guides. The exact same guides available to the BIOS R&D teams of motherboard vendors, a surprising fact considering a single man managed to outdo an entire industry. Here is the download link to the patch: click
The Stilt posted a video in which he showed a 4.1GHz A10-6800K completing SuperPI in 17 minutes and 34 seconds. The fastest 5GHz Richland SuperPI 32M is around 18 minutes and 15 seconds. A lot faster! For more information, check out the thread in the HWBot forums.
50 Comments on AMD Super Pi History To Be Rewritten, Courtesy The Stilt
(p.s. Submit your scores to HWbot while you can)
Stilt said "sad"...
I'm more like "horrified".
Excellent work. Respect !
I don't know what the purpose of this is really.
Apart from that, not that many mainstream programs. Most programmers try to use as least x87 code as possible, since it is ancient, and usually quite inefficient. This might also be the reason why AMD didn't bother with fixing this, although noone is sure.
Seriously after doing some research, nothing uses x87 micro-code any more. Compiles, while they still have access to these instructions, never generate code that uses it. Anything that could have been with x87 is almost exclusively SSE of some form. Improving performance of obsolete code to make AMD look better in this one benchmark is silly. Especially when the benchmark is mainly used as a stress test.
Without patch: scored 1403, 1406 and 1417 for an average of 1408,7
with patch: scored 1407, 1380, 1378 for an average of 1388,3
Will try to do some superPI later, but apparently either Kanter was wrong, or the patch doesn't work for all x87 code.
Not trying to say the patch doesn't work, but I was thinking of physx being a good candidate for seeing some improvements.
Edit: it could of course also mean the patch isn't working correctly; The program reports my µcode being out of date, and that I should update my bios. So either Asus is lazy, or theres a bug in the program (I've got the latest bios). Also, it keeps saying fix required, even after I've pressed fix(from the second click on, it reported there was nothing left to fix).
Edit2: Oops, after some deeper digging in the original post, it seems the code is protected on Zambezi, meaning that indeed there is nothing that can be fixed for my CPU. Bummerrrr.
Here's with the fix enabled:
And here it is disabled:
It seems to make it alot worse; unless his labels are backwards and disable=enable.
Edit: So, I was just wanting to make sure cuz I couldn't remember my regular score at 4.5 so I OC'ed real quick to 5.2 and tried it because I know for sure that I normally do just over 17 seconds on 1M at 5.2. Down to 14 seconds for 1M with it set to disable. I think his settings are labeled backwards.
Now I tried running 32M at 5.2ghz.
If all you care about is running bogus benches, then carry on. If you care about actually using your PC, then test with real applications and the best drivers.
That is a load of BS. It should not be like that and yet it is. There are quite a few programs AMD has the ability to perform better in, yet due to program design it cannot. If you don't believe that look a little harder. It's not just AMD either there was testing done with a Via nano set to look like an Intel chip and it offered 15-30% better performance. I wouldn't try and argue something that is documented as an Intel owner I would just be mad that they are trying to prevent competition by making the competition look weaker. That is BS and anyone who has looked into it knows that.
i hope will follow soon :toast:
i hope they fire the people who made the blunder. fools getting paid to do something and still dont do it better than some random dude who just did it himself.
:respect: to stilt.