Interesting AMD Processor Issues – EdgeSight and GPOs.
Just cleaning out my inbox and noticed 2 separate threads on AMD Processor issues.
From David Paoleschi : FYI – Dual-Core AMD issue to be aware of.
This issue arose during an EdgeSight install at a client. This issue manifested itself as corrupted reports within ES, and inconsistent report generation time when querying Reporting Services. Turns out the issue was on the 64 bit SQL server (with Reporting Services).
"An internal error occurred on the report server. See the error log for more details. (rsInternalError)". While checking online, the error message refers to the Microsoft.ReportingServices under SQL server as seen within these links:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/895980
Applied AMD’s Dual-core Optimizer Utility and now all summary reports and subscriptions within EdgeSight show no errors or slowness
https://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html
From Jacques Bensimon and Aaron Silber : FYI – GPO / AMD processor drift
This issue arose during a XenApp installation where GPOs were being processed incorrectly and sometimes not at all.
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/938448
“ A Windows Server 2003-based server may experience time-stamp counter drift if the server uses dual-core AMD Opteron processors or multiprocessor AMD Opteron processors. When this problem occurs, operations that rely on the time-stamp counter may not function correctly. These operations include network communications and performance monitoring. ”
You’ll notice that even under SP2 the boot.ini modification has to be done in cases where Windows is unable to properly test whether the processor can support this or that timer mechanism (possibly due to missing BIOS support). Since they don’t offer a way to find out whether Windows is in fact able to test, I guess the safe bet is to make the boot.ini entry.