AMD is going to release BIOS changes to motherboards running their Ryzen 7 processor after it caused system hang. AMD admits that there are some problems in FMA3 code that causes headaches on PC owners who bought their newest processor. While AMD didn't elaborate the root of the problem, it appeals to the Ryzen 7 owners to constantly check for updates from their motherboard manufacturers.
AMD stressed that they pinpointed the problem from the FMA3 code that initiates system hangs. It also appears that all three of Ryzen 7 desktop processors are affected by the culprit. All of Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 1700, and Ryzen 7 1700X aren't safe against freezing. These three sports the innovative AMD AM4 socket. However, running FMA3 workloads seems to cause hard system lock in most instances, according to Digital Trends.
The problem came to light after the open-source tool Flops Version 2 of Alexander Yee did some processor benchmarking on AMD Ryzen 7. While not totally tailored to make benchmarking on Ryzen 7, Flops V2 used Haswell binary to test AMD's processor instead. Remember that Haswell supports FMA microprocessor instruction set. Hence, Ryzen 7 was busted to have caused system hang.
Here is the twist, it appears that FMA3 is not the sole culprit for Ryzen 7's weakness. Users reported that simple apps can also randomly cause system hang and runs hot in most cases, according to PC World. Although Yee already stressed that it is impossible for user-mode apps to significantly crash the whole AMD system.
Here is another worry among companies that opt to use AMD processors; the yet to release Zen-based Naples processors. This processor could execute FMA3 codes through virtual machines. If so, inducing FMA (again) on Ryzen 7 might cause another trouble if AMD can't fix the system hang problems in time. At any rate, Ryzen 7 is just two weeks old and AMD will surely try to do everything to regain footing from where their processor slipped.
