AMD Ryzen 7950X: Alleged maximum CPU clock of 5.85 GHz

In the upcoming night from August 29th to August 30th, 2022 AMD wants to officially present its first desktop processors from the Ryzen 7000 series aka Raphael. In advance, the leaks are piling up, especially for the top model Ryzen 9 7950X with 16 CPU cores, which is supposed to clock faster than any other AMD processor to date.

 

A single-core boost of 5.7 GHz has been circulating in the rumor mill for weeks, which AMD will probably market as a boost clock frequency. However, the maximum possible value should be slightly higher at 5.85 GHz. This is what the Weibo member “Venom Warlock Marvin” wrote, who also shared a screenshot of the CPU-Z selection tool.

AMD already specified a lower clock frequency for the Ryzen 5000 generation than the processors can achieve even without overclocking. The data sheet for the Ryzen 9 5950X says 4.9 GHz, but many copies can achieve up to 5.05 GHz under load on a CPU core – the so-called Fmax clock. The Angstronomics website discussed the 5.85 GHz in May, but at the time without naming a specific Ryzen model.

AVX-512 support

The CPU-Z screenshot shared on Weibo lists the supported instructions as AVX-512, i.e. super-wide 512-bit vectors. The Support was confirmed by y-Cruncher developer Alexander Yeewhich is bringing AVX-512 optimizations for Zen 4 processors to the upcoming v0.7.10 release.

This results in a bizarre situation for desktop processors: Intel has pushed the AVX-512 instructions for many years, but has since disabled the Alder Lake generation Core i-12000 to align the instruction sets between the performance and efficiency cores. The latter do not master an AVX-512 in order to make the caches and data paths narrower and thus save power. AMD has always sidelined AVX-512 and is only bringing support now that Intel is no longer considering it.