Microsoft patch Windows 7 to improve Bulldozer performance

Many people cited the reason for Bulldozer’s disappointing performance as an Operating system issue by which Windows could not properly function with the 8 cores Bulldozer had to offer. Now it would appear this is actually the case as Microsoft have released a hotfix for the Windows 7 ( and Windows Server 2008 R2) operating systems which apparently fixes the issues of Windows 7 not understanding Bulldozer’s Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature in the correct way. Apparently this may have been affecting performance and now Bulldozer CPUs should perform faster in multi-threaded applications.

Microsoft said this about the latest patch:

“This article introduces an update that optimizes the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs that are used by Windows 7-based or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computers. Currently, the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs is slower than expected. This behavior occurs because the threading logic in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 is not optimized to use the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature. This feature was introduced in the Bulldozer family of AMD CPUs. 

Note This issue may occur when you use applications that run in multiple threads.”

Download the hotfix here.

Source: Microsoft