Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) was expecting to be celebrating right about now. The beginning of its campaign to grab back marketshare from Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is underway. The new Ryzen 7 CPU was released with considerable fanfare at the start of March, the Ryzen 5 is coming in a matter of weeks, and its new Naples CPUs for data centers have been announced.
Unfortunately, there’s a snag and it’s a pretty serious one. Those new AMD Ryzen CPUs are causing PCs to lock up. Advanced Micro Devices has confirmed the issue and is working on a fix.
AMD Ryzen Chips Are a Critical Launch
This is a critical time for Advanced Micro Devices. The company has been competing against Intel in the market for computer CPUs for decades, and AMD has slipped into single-digit marketshare.
However, 2017 marks a potential turning point for AMD, an opportunity to hit its rival hard.
Intel has abandoned its “tick tock” CPU release strategy, meaning that this year’s seventh-generation Core processors are a modest improvement over last year’s. Advanced Micro Devices, on the other hand, is going all out with significant improvements to its chips, making them much faster than before.
On top of that, AMD’s strategy of pushing multiple cores and multi-threading across its CPU line-up is beginning to pay off with the growing popularity of PC software that can take advantage of this capability — virtual reality, video games and video editing software, for example.
Intel’s decision to more or less coast this year combined with the surge in popularity of VR and other applications that perform better with multi-threading CPUs gives AMD an opening.
The AMD Ryzen 7 is taking on Intel’s Core i7 for performance desktops, the soon-to-be-released Ryzen 5 is aimed at the mainstream Intel Core i5. And the recently announced AMD Naples is coming in the second quarter to take on Intel’s Xeon processors in data centers. The high performance, 128-core Naples is claimed to outperform the Xeon by as much as 2.5 times on key tasks.
But there’s a problem.
AMD Ryzen 7 Is Locking Up PCs
The press around AMD’s new generation of processors had been largely positive. However, potential disaster struck when reports began to surface that PCs equipped with the new AMD Ryzen 7 chips were locking up.
At the start of the week, AMD confirmed that there was an issue with FMA3 code — found in specialized software primarily used for benchmarking PCs. That makes sense given that reviewers and early adopters were busy testing the new CPUs to see just how fast they are.
Yesterday, AMD clarified the issue, insisting the FMA3 code causing the problem had been written for Intel processors, was used primarily in customized testing software and had not affected users running “real” applications.
That being said, the company also told PCMag that the FMA3 issue affects all AMD Ryzen processors and that a fix was being released:
“We have identified the root cause and will soon release BIOS changes to motherboard vendors that will resolve the issue. Please watch for new BIOS updates from your motherboard vendor to incorporate this fix.”
Dodging the Naples Bullet
As pointed out by PCMag, while this was a stumble for the Ryzen 7 CPU launch, Advanced Micro Devices actually got lucky. The same issue affects its Naples CPUs and had it not been discovered before any of those made their way into data centers, a relatively minor hiccup could have turned into a big public relations black eye.
The next big day for Advanced Micro Devices is April 11. That’s when the AMD Ryzen 5 series launches, destined for mainstream desktop PCs. That will be followed by the second quarter launch of the AMD Naples higher-performance sever processors.
Expect the company to be pushing that FMA3 code fix and in the meantime, quietly requesting reviewers to stay away from benchmarking software that uses it.
As of this writing, Brad Moon did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
