AMD has announced they will be introducing Adaptive Undervolting tools for their precision Boost Overdrive software, available for the latest Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. This feature will be made available come launch of AGESA 1180 on 400-series and 500-series motherboards (estimated availability in early December), and will require a BIOS update to enable at the software level. According to AMD, this tool will dynamically calculate the precise amount of voltage required for a given task, analyzing internal sensors (such as workload, temperature, socket limits) and adapting voltage values on the fly at up to 1000 times a second.

This approach by AMD will bring a new age for CPU undervolting, which usually only allows for users to undervolt their CPU on the basis of the worst-case scenario: usually, the way undervolters work is by incrementally reducing the CPU's voltage and testing for stability via stress applications, gaming, or other specialized applications. This means that the CPU will have adequate juice so as not to fail in these scenarios - but of course, your CPU isn't always (in fact, it's almost never, depending on your specific use-case) using the full CPU processing power; this means that all other workloads where the CPU isn't under 100% utilization still have room for voltage reductions. With AMD's Adaptive Undervolting, this will now become possible.In the most basic terms possible, this will mean higher CPU longevity (lower voltages means lower stress on the CPU), alongside reduced power consumption - of interest as ecological consciousness becomes more pervasive. However, another very appealing side to this equation is that of increased performance being extracted from your CPU. We all know about that "silicon lottery" effect where differing CPUs will have differing power characteristics; and we also know that CPU manufacturers set base voltages so as to enable the majority of produced CPUs for a given tier (for example, the Ryzen 9 5900X) to operate "sans probleme".This silicon lottery will soon be able to be taken advantage of by users by using AMD's Adaptive Undervolting, since this means that voltages will be intelligently, dynamically applied according to their particular CPU's power characteristics. Lower voltages across the CPU stress curve will enable for lower temperatures, which could allow for higher boost clocks to be maintained, for longer periods of time, than if the full, original voltage were to be applied.

AMD's Adaptive Undervolting will allow users to define their undervolting characteristics by "stages", with each differing stage accounting for 3-5 millivolts, up to a maximum of 30 stages (this means a maximum undervolt up to 90-150 millivolt). AMD says that enabling this feature could lead to up to 2% higher single-thread performance and up to 10% higher multithread performance, as lower temperatures enable the CPU to more aggressively Boost under these conditions. According to AMD, this undervolting technique shows higher gains the higher number of CCDs (and thusly, of cores) that a given CPU has available in silicon.AMD has also stated that this is going to be applied to all new processors going forward; back-porting of this technology to pre-Ryzen 5000 CPUs isn't possible as it requires engineering optimizations that were introduced specifically with Ryzen 5000. The Adaptive Undervolting feature will firstly be available via BIOS settings, but AMD plans to bring this feature up to its OS-level Ryzen master utility.