AMD Ryzen 3000 engineering sample may have been faster than AMD let on

[Nergal]

 

AMD demonstrated just how capable its Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are at CES 2019, wiping the floor with Intel’s flagship Core i9 9900K during a live Cinebench benchmark. And while this chip outpaced Intel’s top mainstream chip with ease, outperforming it massively per watt, rumour has it that AMD purposefully limited the engineering sample’s performance.

AMD will soon have process node advantage over its long-standing rivals, Intel. The company is shifting over to the 7nm process node produced by TSMC, while Chipzilla has just about got its head around 10nm and will be rolling that out by the end of 2019. At least for the better half of a year or so, AMD will be well ahead of the game.

Keen to show off how this technological advancement will push AMD over the leading edge, it set an eight-core engineering sample loose on Intel’s i9 9900K live on stage at CES. While the the Ryzen’s result was nothing spectacular, it matched the i9 9900K’s score with some 47W less power consumption. But there may yet be greater performance lying dormant in the silicon.

According to a source speaking directly with AMD – reported by hardware YouTuber DannyzPlay – the engineering sample used live on stage was power limited by 30-40%. That doesn’t necessarily mean an equal boost to performance with an unfettered chip – power/performance do not scale in tandem forever – but it could imply some performance has been purposefully left on the table by AMD.

Of course, that’s all subject to whether this rumour proves true or not. Grab your salt, etc.

But carefully balancing the AMD chip to rattle Intel’s dominance isn’t a bad play by any means. Managing the power to almost exactly match the performance of Intel’s chip allows AMD to demonstrate the meaningful drop in power consumption afforded to it by the 7nm process. Whereas the performance gained by an unfettered chip without restriction would likely not have been quite so drastic.

[imperialHafoc]

This is not uncommon they give out the golden processors to reviewers, the youtube channel adoredtv is good on this subject