CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 28

That AMD's Zen 5 processors will be much faster than current-gen Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000) chips is something we've heard before, but this time around, the spinning of the rumor mill comes from a fascinating source: Jim Keller.

In case you weren't aware, Keller is a renowned processor guru, and in fact led the development of the original Zen architecture at AMD way back in 2012.

He left Team Red three years later and is now CEO of Tenstorrent, but clearly he knows a thing or two about the Zen microarchitecture - and he's provided a pretty impressive guestimate of how effective it might be.

YouTube channel SkatterBencher, with ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard and EK custom loop water cooling, has managed to push the new AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU to 5.4 GHz with some clever overclocking.

The Ryzen 7000X3D series, with 3D V-Cache technology, are CPUs not designed for overclocking. AMD has manually disabled manual overclocking on the chip outside of a few exceptions-Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and AMD's Curve Optimizer.

So if you're wondering how SkatterBencher managed to push the single-core clock speeds to 5.4 GHz and 4.85 GHz on all eight cores, it was a somewhat complicated process that took advantage of the features of the ASUS motherboard - namely two external clock generators.

Intel has issued a Product Change Notification outlining that several 11th Generation Tiger Lake CPUs will be discontinued as of January 26, 2024.

The list primarily covers mobile processors, including Core i5, i7, and even the powerful Intel Core i9-11900H processor, as Intel shifts the focus to 12th Generation Alder Lake and 13th Generation Raptor Lake line-ups. This makes sense, as these CPUs are the only real options out there for DIY builders.

The list doesn't cover all models, and the desktop line-up is limited to 11th Generation Tiger Lake B-series processors with a 65W TDP. These CPUs, like the Intel Core i9-11900KB, are mainly used for smaller systems like Intel NUC.

AMD has released new firmware that speeds up the time taken for a Ryzen 7000 PC to boot quite considerably - in fact, AM5 rigs now boot twice as fast.

As Hardware Times reports, a fair number of users have been complaining that their Ryzen 7000 system - built on AMD's new AM5 chipset for Zen 4 - is seriously sluggish to boot (including the tech site itself).

Now we have a piece of evidence that the new BIOS update from AMD (AGESA 1006) reduces boot times significantly, as shown by HXL, a well-known leaker on Twitter.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is released tomorrow (April 6) - with reviews set to arrive later today - but we've just had another last-minute leak that indicates the performance of this CPU will pretty much match the more expensive 7950X3D.

The leaked slide aired by VideoCardz, which is purportedly straight from AMD's launch materials - apply all the usual caveats around rumors here, by the way, though we've seen another slide from the tech site too (we'll come back to that) - shows how the 7800X3D performs compared to the 7950X3D in 1080p resolution (with high graphics details).

Going by the AMD benchmarks across a raft of games, the 7800X3D offers 92% to 113% of the performance level of the 7950X3D, despite the gulf in price between the two chips.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is on the cusp of being launched - it hits shelves on April 6 - and a fresh leak (following a more pedestrian piece of recent spillage) shows it outguns Intel's Core i9-13900K, the heavyweight Raptor Lake processor.

This leak comes from AMD itself and takes the form of a presentation slide that VideoCardz got hold of (which looks authentic enough, but as ever, remain cautious about anything from the rumor mill).

The slide shows that the 7800X3D is up to 30% faster for frame rates in one game AMD benchmarked, although the average is much lower than this at (up to) 7% - this is at 1080p resolution (with high graphics details).

AMD's Zen 5 processors have just been the subject of a couple of fresh leaks, although this latest spillage - from two well-known YouTube leakers - can't agree on how fast these next-gen CPUs could be.

The YouTubers in question are Moore's Law is Dead (MLID, see the video above) and RedGamingTech (RGT, see the video below), both of whom have provided pretty big info dumps on Zen 5 (likely to be Ryzen 8000 CPUs, though we don't know that for sure).

We're told via these leaks that Zen 5 could be made on both 4nm and 3nm processes at TSMC, with desktop chips set to use 4nm apparently, and 3nm will be for some APUs (others will be 4nm) and also next-gen server chips.

AMD has officially launched its new entry-level A620 chipset for Ryzen 7000 processors, with models from ASRock, ASUS, MSI, and others making their way to market with pricing starting at USD 85.

Before the official release, early looks at models from motherboard partners like ASRock and MSI have detailed that going entry-level for AM5 means no overclocking for CPUs, so no Precision Boost Overdrive and Auto-OC. We've also got confirmation that A620 motherboards will only fully support Ryzen 7000 non-X CPUs with a TDP of 65W.

To keep costs down, the VRMs of these boards have been designed for 65W though AMD notes that Ryzen 7000 CPUs with higher TDPs will boot if the BIOS' AGESA version supports them. Even so, multithreaded performance will be limited, but AMD expects that this will have minimal impact on game performance.

Earlier this week, our eyebrows climbed a fair distance up our forehead when we spied a rumor that maybe AMD's next-gen Zen 5 CPUs were coming out later this year - but this isn't happening.

As we wrote at the time, this seemed like a bolt out of the blue, and very much a stretch in terms of believability (particularly given that leaks would surely have been more prevalent at this stage, if it was true).

The rumor came from GIGABYTE, which published a press release on Ryzen-powered servers in which came a surprise mention that the "next generation of AMD Ryzen desktop processors ... will come out later this year."

Ryzen 5800X3D owners are doubtless aware that their CPU isn't supposed to be manually overclocked, with AMD having locked out the ability to up the voltage.

Now, though, it seems there is a possibility to perform such an overclock, but it isn't a feature, rather a bug in ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI's apps, according to reports.

Before we go any further, we should stress the following: Do not use this flaw to experiment with overclocking the Ryzen 5800X3D, as you'll almost certainly nuke the processor irrecoverably.