> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.
I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.
By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.
OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).
If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!
> so, to test, one of us took a heavily PBO'd 9700X and changed /proc/cpuinfo to be a "9700X3D" and ran a Passmark run to see if the software would be fooled...
The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.
Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.
This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.
Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.
A major takeaway from this is that the news media can easily be misled and report false information. Everyone sees this whenever there's a news article in a field they are an expert in, but then they trust all of the other articles in fields they are not.
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
I was hoping for a slightly budgetier X3D chip but I went and got a plain 9700 a few months ago. I realized I probably don't need the performance and the extra power budget/efficiency of using a 65W chip was nice.
> I feel badly for all of the people who may have held off on a 9800X3D purchase because of this Passmark that we thought wouldn't work.
I'm considering a new build soon, but RAM prices are out of control, like they've more than doubled since June! (Damn AI bubble...) I guess I'll have to get by with my Ryzen 1800X a bit longer.
I’m rocking an AM4 build still and very happy with the bump I got from going to a 5800X and maxing out the RAM (primarily for productivity use rather than gaming).
Readit News
As do we all.
Dead Comment
[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils
Other examples include "let's build a submarine" https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11828-how_to_build_a_submarine_a..., creating your own 2000s style phone ringtone/wallpaper subscription service https://blamba.de/ or running toslink audio over regular long-distance fiber links https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/sfp-experiment-ultra-long-ra...
If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!
The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.
Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.
"New CPU in Passmark" news has become so regular, I've long since assumed that they are not leaks at all, but intentional product hype.
EXIF metadata is editable, too. Similar that it could be useful intelligence, but it is very easy to deceive others with it.
The mainstream journalism about this was actually pretty good
No
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Clearly there's a market for a 9700X3D though!
I'm considering a new build soon, but RAM prices are out of control, like they've more than doubled since June! (Damn AI bubble...) I guess I'll have to get by with my Ryzen 1800X a bit longer.