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Guru3D.com » News » AMD Preps BIOS Update to Fix FMA3 Freezes for Ryzen

AMD Preps BIOS Update to Fix FMA3 Freezes for Ryzen

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/23/2017 08:22 AM | source: | 8 comment(s)
AMD Preps BIOS Update to Fix FMA3 Freezes for Ryzen

AMD will be issueing a new BIOS for Ryzen motherboards, the company discovered why FMA3 code is causing system hangs on PCs using a new Ryzen desktop processor. AMD didn’t provide a detailed report on the root cause, the company said that BIOS changes will be distributed to motherboard manufacturers to resolve the issue. 

Customers are encouraged to keep an eye on their motherboard vendor’s website for an update, reports digital trends.

We are aware of select instances where FMA code can result in a system hang,” the company said. “We have identified the root cause.”

Ryzen processors reportedly cause a hard system lock when running certain FMA3 workloads. The first sign of trouble appeared in the open-source processor benchmark Flops (v2) by Alexander “Mystical” Yee. This simple program provides separate versions supporting specific processor architectures, such as Intel’s Haswell, Skylake, and so on. 

But because the author has yet to upload a version for AMD’s new Zen architecture used in the Ryzen chips, the Haswell-specific binary is the version of choice for testing Ryzen … at least, for now.

Using the Haswell binary is important because it supports the Fused Multiply-Add (FMA) microprocessor instruction set, which is also supported by AMD’s Ryzen processors. The short description of FMA is that the processor can compute A+BxC in one step before rounding the final result. The “unfused” method involves BxC first, rounding the number, adding that to A, and rounding the final result.

However, Ryzen’s issue with FMA3 isn’t locked to the Flops benchmark. Simple apps with basic user privileges can crash a Ryzen-based machine. Even more, code using FMA3 could be executed on virtual machines running on AMD’s upcoming Zen-based “Naples” processors for the enterprise. Thus, finding the FMA3 issue in Flops now saved AMD and corporations from a lot of headache stemming from the security implications alone at the launch of Naples.

“Don’t be fooled by the Haswell binary,” Yee said. “The benchmark is five years old and I’ve largely neglected it for the last three. So I haven’t updated it for Zen yet. Any processor will be able to run any of the binaries if it supports the underlying instruction sets. If it doesn’t, the program merely crashes with an ‘illegal instruction.’ Under no circumstances should a user-mode application be able to bring down an entire system.”







« Vulkan To Get Broad OS Multi-GPU Support · AMD Preps BIOS Update to Fix FMA3 Freezes for Ryzen · Facebook Live Targets Gamers with New PC Streaming »

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Silva
Senior Member



Posts: 1778
Joined: 2013-06-04

#5411385 Posted on: 03/23/2017 03:43 PM
At least they fixed it good job..


Bugs are expected from a new platform and it's their job to fix them if they want to gain trust from consumers.

Amx85
Senior Member



Posts: 333
Joined: 2016-09-28

#5411400 Posted on: 03/23/2017 04:11 PM
So fast response, i hope other bugfixes comes soon

schmidtbag
Senior Member



Posts: 6561
Joined: 2012-11-10

#5411433 Posted on: 03/23/2017 04:59 PM
Bugs are expected from a new platform and it's their job to fix them if they want to gain trust from consumers.

Agreed. I was wondering when an issue like this was going to pop up. For something as complex as modern x86 CPUs, problems are inevitable from a fresh new architecture.

PrMinisterGR
Senior Member



Posts: 7999
Joined: 2014-09-27

#5411448 Posted on: 03/23/2017 05:28 PM
Another piece of software that benefits Ryzen just by switching the target architecture to Haswell.

Another after LLVM itself.

waltc3
Senior Member



Posts: 1390
Joined: 2014-07-22

#5411451 Posted on: 03/23/2017 05:33 PM
Agreed. I was wondering when an issue like this was going to pop up. For something as complex as modern x86 CPUs, problems are inevitable from a fresh new architecture.


Yep, with new architectures it's as expected as the weather... ;)

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