According to bit-tech the microcode is being tested and will see the light of day in mid to late June.

AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) build 1.0.0.6 brings claimed improvements to the memory subsystem. AMD said: “AGESA 1.0.0.6 officially adds 26 new parameters that can improve the compatibility and reliability of DRAM, especially for memory that does not follow the industry-standard JEDEC specifications e.g. faster than 2667, manual overclocking, or XMP2 profiles.”

Writing in his bog, AMD's Robert Hallock said that manual or automated control of these parameters should nevertheless make it a little more straightforward to use DDR4-3200 modules - or faster if you have the talent.

The new settings include additional dividers for memory clocks up to DDR4-4000 without the need to change the system's reference clock, manual configuration of 1T or 2T command rates, row cycle time, CAS write latency, write recovery time, and the voltage fed to the DDR4 PHY on the Ryzen chip itself. While these settings, and considerably more including a power-saving feature, all form part of the AGESA 1.0.0.6 firmware, it will be up to individual motherboard manufacturers as to how many - or how few - are exposed to end-users.

AMD has also added a feature to help drive adoption of Ryzen and other Zen-architecture processors for virtualisation.

Dubbed PCI Express Access Control Services (ACS) it enables support for manual assignment of PCIe graphics cards within logical containers called "IOMMU groups."

The hardware resources of an IOMMU group can then be dedicated to a virtual machine. This capability is especially useful for users that want 3D-accelerated graphics inside a virtual machine. With ACS support, it is possible to split a two GPU system such that a host Linux OS and a Windows VM both have a dedicated graphics cards. The virtual machine can access all the capabilities of the dedicated GPU, and run games inside the virtual machine at near-native performance.