Component manufacturers, as they launch new solutions, forget about the “old” ones. Something like this has happened at AMD with processors prior to the Ryzen 5000. AMD Ryzen 1000, 2000 and 3000 they have stayed no bios updates for a long time. By surprise and without warning, AMD has updated the microcode for the BIOS of all its processors based on the Zen architecture.
For those who are not familiar with this microcode thing, say that they are simply instructions for the processor. These are stored in the PC’s BIOS and help improve performance or fix security vulnerabilities, among other things. Motherboard manufacturers add them to BIOS updates that are released shortly after this microcode is released.
AMD has published new microcode for its “old” processors
Last Friday, according to Phoronix, AMD published new microcode for the Ryzen processors based on Zen, Zen+ and Zen 2. What this tells us is that these processors could receive a new BIOS in the coming weeks. Now motherboard manufacturers will need to work with this code and implement it.
The update has not been announced by AMD and there is no public information about the changes. That yes, the amount of changes made seems to be quite significant. It should be noted that the last update was from December 2019. The microcode has not received updates for two and a half years.
As they explain, the previous file for the “old” AMD Ryzen had a weight of 6476 bytes. The new file has a weight of 9700 byteswhich represents an increase in size of practically 50%.
It should be noted that this update seems to be focused on Linux distributionsnot for Windows.
Two possibilities are considered. The first is that there are many routine fixes and updates that have been encapsulated in a single package. It is also considered that it could be a group of security updates for the AMD Ryzen 1000, 2000 and 3000. It seems that this last possibility could be the correct one, although it cannot be guaranteed.
AMD has not released any information about the contents of the package, unfortunately. It is possible that in the coming weeks, after analyzing the content, it will be possible to know what it contributes.
The Ryzen 5000 are also updated
Along with this Linux package, a specific package for Zen3-based AMD Ryzen 5000 has been distributed. For this case there is no information either, so it is unknown what has changed in this new microcode.
Ryzen 5000 processors do get regular updates every few months, so there’s no surprise here. Reportedly, this new update package is the same size as the one released in February this year. This may indicate that there are only better fixes or that the code has been tweaked a bit to optimize performance.
Anyway, both microcodes seem to be reserved for Linux. Possibly soon we will know that AMD releases similar packages for Windows in no time. So we will be attentive to report any kind of news in this regard.
