Back at Intel’s Architecture 2021 event, when the Santa Clara company shared the core design details of its Alder Lake processor architecture, the company stated that Windows 11 has been optimized to best take advantage of Alder Lake’s hybrid performance architecture and the new Thread Director technology that helps schedule Windows 11 tasks.

Performance data, including the latest, shows it’s more of a mixed bag as Windows 11 22H2 and Windows 10 22H2 seemed to trade blows with each other depending on the workload. The delta is probably not enough for anyone to consider upgrading to Windows 11 as it is almost always less than 10%.

However, things could be completely different for AMD with its new Ryzen 70003D chips that were revealed earlier today at CES 2023. While AMD first introduced 3D V-cache last year with the 8-core 5800X3D, the company is now moving beyond 8 Cores with 12-core and 16-core options. Interestingly, the core layout is quite different for the 8-core and 12/16-core versions. AMD uses the latest Core Complex Die (CCD) approach where each CCD contains up to eight cores. So for the 12 cores, that’s six cores in each CCD, and for the 16 cores, that’s all eight cores in each CCD.

Although the CCDs in regular Ryzen processors are duplicates, in the new Ryzen 7000X3D processors, AMD will equip only one CCD with 64MB 3D V-cache. This means that the other CCD will be tuned for high clock speeds. AMD’s Scott Stankard shared this detail in an interview with PCWorld today. This approach will allow the 7000X3D chips to handle both high cache use cases, such as games and such, as well as high clock speed scenarios.

The trade-off, explains AMD, is worth it because using V-cache in two CCDs did not produce much better results and mainly added to the cost.

However, to make this possible, AMD says it had to work with Microsoft and game developers. Since only one CCD will have a good 3D V-cache, the task timing needs to be correct so that a particular workload is sent to its designated CCD for processing.

Scott Stankard explains:

I used to call it magic, but it’s not magic, it’s hard work right, that we did within our engineering team, with Microsoft, with the game developers so that we know which CCD to use at the right time

Although AMD doesn’t specifically mention Windows 11, it’s almost certain that these optimizations will make their way to Windows 11 and future versions. Windows 10 can get these optimizations as well.

The new scheduler update could also help alleviate CCD-related performance issues that reportedly plagued AMD Ryzen processors on Windows 11 22H2.

Source: PCWorld (YouTube)