AMD clarifies Best Cores vs Preferred Cores for Ryzen

AMD offered some clarification about the CPU boost behaviour seen in tools like Ryzen Master and how it shows in the task manager. There's been some discussion about this and now AMD is clearing it up by confirming that there's a difference between the actual mapping of the "best cores" information in Ryzen Master and the "preferred cores" mapping that AMD's firmware communicates to the operating system. The meaning here is different:

AMD’s official stance on the Ryzen Master discrepancy is the following:

“Ryzen Master, using [the same] firmware readings, selects the single best voltage/frequency curve in the entire processor from the perspective of overclocking. When you see the gold star, it means that is the one core with the best overclocking potential. As we explained during the launch of 2nd Gen Ryzen, we thought that this could be useful for people trying for frequency records on Ryzen.”

“Overall, it’s clear that the OS-Hardware relationship is getting more complex every day. In 2018, we imagined that the starred cores would be useful for extreme overclockers. In 2019, we see that this is simply being conflated with a much more sophisticated set of OS decisions, and there’s not enough room for nuance and context to make that clear. That’s why we’re going to bring Ryzen Master inline with what the OS is doing so everything is visibly in agreement, and the system continues along as-designed with peak performance.”

Full details at AnandTech.