Intel could be seriously worried here, particularly if it can’t get Raptor Lake out the door before Zen 4 CPUs arrive.
AMD’s Zen 4 flagship CPU, the 16-core model that’ll likely turn out to be the Ryzen 9 7950X, will be capable of hitting 5.5GHz boost speeds by default, with no overclocking needed. This revelation was made courtesy of a PC World livestream (opens in new tab) with AMD’s Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock, who clarified some details about the processor powering the gaming PC which ran the Ghostwire Tokyo demo at AMD’s Computex 2022 keynote. While we already knew that the 16-core CPU reached 5.5GHz in the demo, the really interesting bit is the info that it did this running at default settings – in other words, that’s the boost clock you can expect from the processor out of the box, with no tweaking whatsoever, and no super-fancy cooling solution. Hallock further observed that the test PC platform used a reference AMD AM5 motherboard with a consumer-level AIO liquid cooler. Interestingly, as Ian Cutress points out on Twitter (opens in new tab), the Zen 4 chip is a prototype model (from April), and most threads were running at around 5.
