AMD Super Pi Performance Fixed With Patch, Benchmark Record To Be Smashed

AMD has always been very poor at Super Pi test scores since the Bulldozer architecture was released. You only need to take a quick glimpse at the graph below to see that both Bulldozer and Piledriver based AMD CPUs flat-out suck, there is no other way to put it. The reason is because the benchmark is very old and uses an instruction set that just doesn’t work very well with AMD.

Unsurprisingly it turns out that the program not AMD CPUs are what is causing the unusually low scores. The Stilt from Finland, according to the HWBot forums, have developed a fix for AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver on Super Pi. For the real world this is totally irrelevant but for the extreme overclocking and benchmarking community this is quite a huge break through.

Apparently the Stilt used BIOS developers guides, that are made available to motherboard vendors, to figure out this performance issue and devise a solution. It’s an impressive achievement and shows how just one person can develop something the entire motherboard industry ignored/missed. The patch for Bulldozer/Piledriver systems can be seen here.

A rough idea of performance is that a 4.1GHz Richland A10-6800K managed 17 minutes and 34 seconds with this patch while without the patch a 5GHz Richland A10-6800K could manage only 18 minutes and 15 seconds. The patch clearly makes a huge difference and we look forward to seeing some more results.

Image courtesy of the Stilt