This week has seen AMD show off its upcoming Zen 4 architecture at Computex. One of the exciting demos involved a 16-core Ryzen 7000 processor, believed to be a prototype of the Ryzen 9 7950X, running Ghostwire Tokyo at up to 5.5 GHz. AMD didn’t reveal too many details about the demonstration at the time, but now we know a little more. Speaking on PCWorld’s The Full Nerd, AMD Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock revealed that the chip was cooled using a consumer-grade 280mm all-in-one liquid cooler from Asetek and sat in a reference AMD motherboard—AM4 coolers will be compatible with new 600-series mobos.
Hallock confirmed that the CPU was not overclocked during the test—it was running at its natural frequency—and that “most” of the threads ran at around 5.5 GHz in the demo. The overlay showed the frequency bouncing between 5.3 GHz and 5.5 GHz, but it remained well above 5 GHz throughout. Hallock did say the fluctuations depended on the game load and scene. As we noted at the time, CPUs sometimes have to drop their frequency even on a single core during hefty workloads, so a Cinebench single-thread run might not hit 5.5 GHz, but the chip still has a much higher clock speed than current Zen 3 processors. AMD said it will launch the Zen 4 platform sometime between September and November, when we’ll also see blisteringly fast, consumer PCIe Gen 5 SSDs like these from Apacer.
