AMD Ryzen 9 7950X to ignite frequency war with 5.85GHz top speed

Pull up a chair, this heavyweight contest is just getting started.

We’re hours away from AMD’s official Ryzen 7000 Series reveal and last-minute leaks keep springing up. The latest to surface at Chinese site Weibo suggests the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X will ship with a maximum boost frequency of 5.85GHz.

That number ringing a bell? If you’ve been keeping abreast of next-gen CPU developments, you might recall that AMD’s proposed top speed is marginally quicker than Intel’s upcoming Core i9-13900K, which scales to 5.8GHz. Coincidence?

Intel’s lofty turbo speed took us by surprise – a significant uptick in frequency without moving to a more advanced manufacturing process is easier said than done – yet AMD’s increase is wholly expected.

The imminent Zen 4 architecture, built on a next-gen 5nm TSMC process, is going to face stern competition from hybrid Intel CPUs, and turning up the wick is but one weapon in the Ryzen arsenal.

At 5.85GHz, Ryzen 9 7950X is destined to be the fastest Ryzen CPU to date, and the highest-clocked part to emerge from TSMC fabs. All-core frequency remains unknown at this point, and we’re intrigued to learn whether or not AMD will offer a 3D V-Cache variant of its flagship 16-core, 32-thread CPU.

Should a Ryzen 9 7950X3D see the light of day, we imagine peak frequency will be sacrificed in favour of greater L3 cache, though to what extent is anyone’s best guess.

One thing’s for certain, the battleground is heating up. AMD fires the first shots at midnight tonight (UK time), with a Ryzen 7000 Series premiere taking place live on YouTube. Grab a coffee and stay tuned, we’ll be bringing you all the latest developments as and when.

Parm Mann
Parm Mann
Club386 founder and editor-in-chief, his journey with hardware pre-dates Google. To this day, nothing beats the nostalgic nineties, piecing together a Pentium CPU and 3DFX graphics card from a Wolverhampton computer market. Away from his computer, Parm is all about Manchester United, woodworking, and family – not necessarily in that order.

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