AMD announces 5.7ghz Ryzen 9 7950X chip retailing for $699 this month, meanwhile Intel hints at vapor chip that theoretically might hit 6ghz with no release date and no price. This stinks of desperation on Intel’s part.
Comparing the whole system against an actual task is the only way to really measure - everything else, including the clockspeed, is marketing.
My claim is that (1) results on irrelevant benchmarks like SPEC do matter for CPU sales (probably not for big tech companies that operate their own datacentres – they’ll likely do their own testing – but likely for many ‘savvy’ consumers and also for companies that want to market their computers as having fast CPUs) and (2) the complicated world of benchmarks is handled very poorly by the people who tend to evaluate CPUs with them and publish their results.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....
Edit: found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Rating
The problem was that the CPU clock speed levels categorising your system as high/mid/low performance were quite obviously based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even though at the time AMD actually had a market share of around 40 – 50 % for desktop computers. This meant that everybody with an AMD processor would find his/her performance and graphics settings mysteriously restricted. People using the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors had similar problems if they were still playing those games a few years later.
The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – things were controlled by a rules file in a plain text-based format, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.
This was also useful because the GPU detection had its own share of problems down the line – I still occasionally play Sim City 4, and for some reason or other on my current system the game doesn't correctly detect the amount of video RAM I have and therefore resorts to extremely restrictive fallback settings unless I manually override it, and AMD recycling graphics card model numbers also caused some confusion that had to be manually fixed.
Sometimes this competition thing is a distraction. Like now there is an emergency meeting for the three year roadmap to shrink to 1 year and with less innovation than they planned it to have, and the actual three year roadmap becomes 5 years because of wasted energy for short term gains.
But other times when competing, long visions lose. And so do the workers who have them. This is detrimental.
I am not ever working for something like this I hope, but I do see others work in this way. And sometimes they are gifted yet unable to make that gift work.
Though I hope the pendulum is swinging enough to keep driving the improvements. My current desktop CPU is absolute overkill while sipping relatively little power during my light usage.
It'll be faster than a Ryzen 5000 drawing the same amount of power: according to AMD the Ryzen 7000 will be "up to 49 percent"[1] faster at the same power draw.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/918007/amd-launches-ryzen-70...
The official announcement indicated significantly better power efficiency. AMD claims that if you limit both to a 65W TDP, you'll see 74% better performance on the new generation, but that even at full TDP, the efficiency will be higher.
However, I am waiting on the actual reviews... not making multi-year decisions based off of limited, pre-release information. If it is more efficient, then vowing to stick with an older, less efficient product just because it has a lower TDP number on the box doesn't make any sense. Efficiency is the only thing that matters when seeking to avoid a space heater, since the less efficient product will generate more heat for a given amount of work. All of these processors will clock down when idle
https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+7000+running+hot&rlz=1...
But, all of this is still irrelevant to efficiency. Running at 230W for 1 second to complete a task would generate less heat / use less electricity than running at 150W for 2 seconds to complete the same task.
But, efficiency is often a curve, and you can supposedly get crazy efficiency by limiting the TDP of Ryzen 7000, so it is an option for those who prize efficiency above maximum performance, and it would still represent an improvement over a Ryzen 5000 at the same TDP. As I said, though, we’ll need to see actual reviews.