Early Zen 3 clock speeds leak – Per-Core Overclocking coming to Ryzen 4000?
Early Zen 3 clock speeds leak – Per-Core Overclocking coming to Ryzen 4000?
Recent rumours have suggested that AMD will be calling this lineup their Ryzen 5000 series, rather than their Ryzen 4000 series, to avoid confusion with today’s Zen 2-powered Ryzen 4000 series of APUs. This shift has not been confirmed, but it would bring some additional clarity to AMD’s future offerings by making all Zen 3 processors Ryzen 5000 chips.Â
Igor’s Lab has reported that they have uncovered fresh new details about AMD’s Zen 3 powered Vermeer processors, uncovering a chip with features sixteen cores, thirty-two threads and base/boost clock speeds of 3.5GHz and 4.8GHz respectively. This chip offers the same base clock speeds as today’s Ryzen 3950X processor and a boost clock speed that’s 100MHz higher.Â
Previously, Zen 3 Vermeer CPU samples were leaked with 3.7GHz base clock speeds and 4.6GHz boost clock speeds, making it possible that final (retail-ready) CPU samples will deliver higher overall clock speeds. That said, AMD is inching ever closer to Zen 3’s launch, which means that final clock speeds need to be finalised soon.Â
Per-Core Overclocking
It has also been reported by Igor’s Lab that AMD’s bringing per-core overclocking to its motherboard AGESA code, presumably allowing AMD users to enable “per-core voltage adjustments” to new Ryzen processors. This granularity will allow AMD users to potentially push their processors further, allowing them to focus on higher clock speeds on a per-core basis.Â
With this change, overclocking should bring more worthwhile performance gains to future Ryzen processors. Perhaps this technique could be used to enable higher levels of single-threaded performance on AMD’s Ryzen processors.
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While Vermeer’s clock speed gains over AMD’s Ryzen 3950X may seem disappointing, it is worth noting that Zen 3’s performance gains will likely come through architectural changes, not raw clock speed enhancements. Zen 3 is due to receive a major cache redesign and other changes to Zen’s core architecture, all of which are designed to deliver more performance to end-users.Â
If AMD can deliver per-core overclocking, clock speed boosts and performance-enhancing architectural changes, Zen 3 will be an incredibly exciting release for the company, at least from the perspective of hardware enthusiasts.Â
You can join the discussion on AMD’s Early Zen 3 clock speeds and per-core overclocking rumours on the OC3D Forums.Â