A Timely Discovery: Examining Our AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Results
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12678/a-timely-discovery-examining-amd-2nd-gen-ryzen-results [www.anandtech.com]
2018-05-17 19:39
Instead of being a benefit to testing, what our investigation found is that when HPET is forced as the sole system timer, it can sometimes a hindrance to system performance, particularly gaming performance. Worse, because HPET is implemented differently on different platforms, the actual impact of enabling it isn’t even consistent across vendors.
This is a kinda interesting read, and also a good cautionary tale from the “turn all the knobs” crypt. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of many benchmarks.
OpenBSD also suffered a bit from HPET slowdown, resolved by switching to TSC.