AMD is uncharacteristically restricting its awesome new CPU feature

By Jacob Roach Published July 15, 2024

David McAfee presenting AMD's new Ryzen 9000 CPUs. — AMD “Zen 5” Tech Day in Los Angeles, California, Wednesday July 10, 2024. (Photo by PaulSakuma.com Photography) AMD

AMD is introducing an exciting new feature for Ryzen 9000 CPUs called Curve Shaper — and only to Ryzen 9000 CPUs. Curve Shaper is an additional layer of control over AMD’s Curve Optimizer, which can help you quickly dial in an undervolt or overclock on AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs and newer. Curve Shaper is a new cutoff point.

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As an AMD tool developer revealed last week, Curve Shaper gives you 15 points of control across the power and frequency spectrum. For each of these points, you can define a positive or negative offset, which applies on top of Curve Optimizer. Let me provide an example.

You can use Curve Optimizer to dial in a positive offset of +10 for a slight overclock. With Curve Shaper, you can add an additional +5 offset when you’re running at medium power and high frequency, for example, or a -5 offset for high power and high frequency. It gives you more local control over how your processor behaves.

Results for the Ryzen 9 9950X at AMD's Tech Day. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

It can have a pretty significant impact, too. AMD demoed Curve Shaper, along with its new support for up to DDR5-8000 memory, and showed a massive jump in score with Cinebench R23. This was a universal offset in Curve Optimizer, as well as a couple of small adjustments with Curve Shaper.

The issue is that only Ryzen 9000 CPUs can use Curve Shaper, and AMD wasn’t able to give me a good reason why. The company confirmed that there’s nothing in Ryzen 9000’s hardware that enables Curve Shaper. The feature could work on Ryzen 7000 CPUs, at the very least. Instead, it pointed to firmware development costs.

AMD showing Curve Shaper in the BIOS. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

This situation feels very similar to Intel’s APO feature, which was initially restricted to 14th-gen CPUs. Intel eventually added support for 12th-gen and 13th-gen CPUs after backlash. It’s possible AMD could reverse course, as well — talking with the company, the feedback on Curve Shaper’s restriction was common.

If you do upgrade to Ryzen 9000, you’ll be able to use the feature through the BIOS. Curve Optimizer is available through AMD’s Ryzen Master utility on desktop, but Curve Shaper is exclusive to the BIOS for now. AMD wouldn’t comment on if it will come to Ryzen Master eventually — though that seems like a pretty safe bet.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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