The newest BIOS slows down the Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 machines

The Microsoft made a sizable blunder with the updating of the newest Surface machines. Because the newest firmware (BIOS) slows down the high end machines quasi to an unusable level.

The software bug is affecting the contontrol of the processors of Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 machines, more accurately the energy management, which may reduce the frequency of the cores all the way to 400 MHz, unnecessarily.

According to the TechRepublic, one of the flags of Intel, the BD PROCHOT (bi-directional processor hot) is in the background of the huge, moreover in some cases permanent slow down. Using this the system can ask the processor to reduce its temperature to avoid a potential overheating. The central processing unit is achieving this by the dissipation, so the frequency and the reduction of the frequency. There is no information for the time being on what causes the unnecessary reduction.

Photo by: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian.
Image source: https://i.guim.co.uk

According to user feedbacks, the phenomenon stops, if they disconnect the charger. Others, however, are reasoning this by an antivirus from a third party. The security mechanism can be shut down by the ThrottleStop utility, but if the temperature of the CPU would really reach a critical level, then to avoid damage, the system simply shuts down, which may lead to data loss. According to the Microsoft's promise, they are treating the awkward bug with high priority, the fix for this will be delivered to the affected users as soon as possible.

The underclock (or throttling) related bugs are not rare. During the last summer, there was similar phenomenon with the Macbook Pros, because the Apple forgot to put in a digital key in the firmware of the high end notebooks. Because of this the energy management was not functioned properly, which led to the overheating of the processors, then to significant performance loss.