The battle is over. Microsoft is finally changing the measuring methodology in its Task Manager from Mega Hertz (MHz) to Mega Transfers per second (MT/s). This comes amid the industry push for more technical correctness in RAM measuring, where the MHz nomenclature does not technically represent the speed at which the memory is actually running. While DRAM manufacturers list both MHz and MT/s, the advertised MHz number is much higher than the effective speed at which the DRAM is running, resulting in confusion and arguments in the industry about choosing the correct labeling of DRAM. A little history lesson teaches us that when single data rate (SDR) RAM was introduced, 100 MHz memory would perform 100 MT/s. However, when double data rate (DDR) memory appeared, it would allow for two memory transfers per clock cycle.

This would introduce some confusion where the MHz speed is often mixed up with MT/s. Hence, Microsoft is trying to repair the damage and list memory speeds in MT/s. Modern DDR5 memory makers are advertising DDR5 kits with "DDR5-4800" or "DDR5-6000," without any suffix like MHz or MT/s. This is because, for example, a DDR5-6000 kit runs at 6,000 MT/s, the effective speed is only 3,000 MHz. The actual clock of the memory is only half of what is advertised. The MT/s terminology would be more accurate and describe memory better. This Task Manager update is in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.3570 in the Beta Channel, which will trickle down to stable Windows 11 updates for everyone soon.

AMD's first generation XDNA-based Neural Processing Unit (NPU) arrived last year, as an onboard aspect of their "Phoenix" Ryzen 7040 mobile processor series, followed many months later by Intel's similarly NPU-laden Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" generation. It was recently revealed that a Windows 11 DirectML preview grants preliminary support for Core Ultra NPUs—Microsoft's software engineering department seems to be prioritizing Intel AI tech. Team Red has already released XDNA on desktop platforms—with its Ryzen 8000G APU family—and the "Hawk Point" 8040 series is nearing a retail launch, but these processors (plus 7040) remain unsupported by Microsoft's DirectML API. An interesting AMD community blog entry was posted two weeks—news outlets have been slow to pick up on its relevance.

Intel NPU activity can be monitored in Windows Task Manager (see screenshot below), and an upcoming update will add competing AMD parts to the mix. Joel Hruska's Team Red community blog post reveals that NPU monitoring for Ryzen 8040 series processors is due soon: " As AI PCs become more popular, there's a growing need for system monitoring tools that can track the performance of the new NPUs (Neural Processing Units) available on select Ryzen 8040 Series mobile processors. A neural processing unit - also sometimes referred to an integrated or on-die AI engine -- can improve battery life by offloading AI tasks that would otherwise be performed on the CPU or GPU. AMD has been working with Microsoft to enable MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) infrastructure on the AMD NPU (Neural Processing Unit)-enabled Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile processors. MCDM is a derivative of Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) that is targeting non-GPU, compute devices, such as the NPU. MCDM enables NPUs to make use of the existing GPU device management infrastructure, including scheduling, power management, memory management, and performance debugging with tools such as the Task Manager. MCDM serves as a fundamental layer, ensuring the smooth execution of AI workloads on NPU devices."

HXL (@9550pro) has highlighted an intriguing pinned post on the Chinese Zhihu community site—where XZiar, a self described "Central Processing Unit (CPU) expert," has shared a very fuzzy/low quality screenshot of a Windows Task Manager session. The information on display indicates that a "Genuine Intel(R) 0000 1.0 GHz" processor was in use—perhaps a very early Lunar Lake (LNL) engineering sample (ES1). XZiar confirmed the pre-release nature of the onboard chip, and teased its performance prowess: "It's good to use the craftsmanship that others have stepped on. It can run 2.8 GHz with only A1 step, and it is very smooth."

The "A1" designation implies that the leaked sample is among the first LNL processor prototypes to exit manufacturing facilities—Intel previewed its "Lunar Lake-MX" SoC package to press representatives last November. XZiar's followers have pored over the screenshot and ascertained that the leaked example sports a "8-core + 8-thread, without Hyperthreading, 4P+4LPE" configuration. Others were confused by the chip's somewhat odd on-board cache designations—L1: 836 KB, L2: 14 MB and L3: 12 MB—XZiar believes that prototype's setup "is obviously not up to par," when a replier compares the spec to an N300 series processor. It is theorized that Windows Task Manager is simply not fully capable of detecting the sample's full makeup, but XZiar reckons that 12 MB of L3 cache is the correct figure.

Action RPG "Atlas Fallen" joins a long line of RPGs this Summer for you to grind into—Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo 4, and Starfield. We've been testing the game for our GPU performance article, and found something interesting—the game isn't optimized for Intel Hybrid processors, such as the Core i9-13900K "Raptor Lake" in our bench. The game scales across all CPU cores—which is normally a good thing—until we realize that not only does it saturate all of the 8 P-cores, but also the 16 E-cores. It ends up with under 80 FPS in busy gameplay at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 4090. Performance is "restored" only when the E-cores are disabled.

Normally, when a game saturates all of the E-cores, we don't interpret it as the game being "aware" of E-cores, but rather "unaware" of them. An ideal Hybrid-aware game should saturate the P-cores for its main workload, and use the E-cores for errands such as processing the audio stack (DSPs from the game), network stack (the game's unique multiplayer network component), physics, in-flight decompression of assets from the disk, etc., which show up in Task Manager as intermittent, irregular load. "Atlas Fallen" appears to be using the E-cores for its main worker threads, and this is found imposing a performance penalty as we found out by disabling the E-cores. This performance penalty is because the E-cores run slower than P-cores, at lower clock speeds, have much lower IPC, and are cache-starved. Frame data being processed by the P-cores end up having to wait for those from the E-cores, which causes the overall framerate to come down.

One nifty new feature currently being deployed to Windows 10 Fast Ring users is the ability to see exactly how much power a given process is consuming in your system's hardware (CPU, GPU & Disk). The new feature, which appears as two additional Task Manager tabs, showcases the instantaneous power usage of a given process, but also features a trend calculator that covers a two-minute interval. This should be pretty handy, if the measurement process is close enough to the real power consumption. This could even be used as another flag for cryptomining malware or scripts in a given webpage. You can check the source for the additional updates that have been brought to build 17704 of the Windows Insider Program.