Working with motherboard partners, AMD has issued a fix for an issue affecting its Ryzen 8000G CPUs, to resolve severe and erroneous performance throttling. This patch amends the Skin Temperature-Aware Power Management (STAPM) feature built into the chips to prevent laptop users getting burnt.
The problem appeared in the just launched 8700G and 8600G APUs, which are processors with very powerful integrated graphics designed for use in small form factor gaming PCs that don’t use or need a separate graphics card. While not really conventional contenders for our best gaming CPU list, we’ve been impressed by the reported capabilities of these AMD chips – such as their ability to hit 132fps in Fortnite without a graphics card – but they launched with this peculiar STAPM-related problem.
STAPM is built into every recent AMD CPU and is a feature designed to help CPUs manage their frequency, and thus temperature, not just by taking into account the temperature of the chip itself but that of the device they’re installed into. Specifically, it means manufacturers can add temperature probes to the cases of their laptops that tell the CPU to cool down a bit so as not to burn the user.
Normally, this feature is simply turned off for non-mobile versions of chips, but for some reason it got missed with the 8000G series APUs. As such, users have been reporting that the CPU would throttle its speed, reducing performance.
Thankfully, though, AMD has acted quickly to issue a fix for the problem and distributed this to its motherboard partners for them to incorporate into motherboard BIOS/UEFI updates. So, if you’ve been tempted by one of these chips, be sure to download the latest BIOS for your system to make sure you don’t suffer from this issue.
As for other AMD CPUs, these are not affected by this problem so while it’s generally a good idea to keep your motherboard BIOS/UEFI up to date, it’s not a crucial download in this instance.
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