Enabling fTPM on AMD processors causes Windows 11 performance degradation
Microsoft officially started to push Windows 11 on October 5 last year, and AMD Ryzen series processors encountered performance degradation in the early days. In some applications, performance may be degraded, and the impact range is about 3%-5%. The reason is the increased latency of the L3 cache, as well as issues with the preferred core feature. The problem was resolved later as Microsoft and AMD released patches one after another.
According to the installation requirements of Microsoft Windows 11, TPM 2.0 needs to be met. In Microsoft’s view, the security of Windows 11 can be improved, as a trusted platform module, which can provide the system with an immutable security key. TPM was originally supposed to be a physical device on the motherboard, but in fact, most motherboards are not configured separately but are implemented through system firmware emulation, which AMD calls fTPM.
According to HotHardware, since the release of Windows 11, several AMD users have reported intermittent stuttering errors with fTPM enabled, and the console may experience brief lags and stutters several times a day. To be precise, a similar problem is not necessarily a Windows 11 problem, because a similar situation may be encountered in Windows 10, but users can choose to disable fTPM to solve it. Doing this on Windows 11, however, may be problematic for everyday use, as some applications require TPM to be enabled to run.
It’s unclear if this is an issue with AMD’s fTPM implementation, or if it’s a Windows issue, perhaps a compatibility issue. The best solution, for now, is the same as before, disable fTPM and fall back to Windows 10, then wait for an official investigation into the specific issue and a software update to fix it.
