AMD Ryzen ES Now Clocked at 3.6 GHz+

Last year during the New Horizon event, AMD wowed the world with their new Ryzen CPU. Brining 8 cores and 16 threads with Broadwell comparable IPC, Ryzen and Zen are set to bring competition back to the desktop x86 CPU market. During the event, CEO Lisa Su promised that Ryzen would reach at least 3,4 GHz and be almost certainly higher by launch. From the newest leaks, it appears that Ryzen now hits 3.6 GHz base clock and with more to come.

According to the source, Ryzen is capable of hitting 3.6 GHz for all cores and reaches as high as 3.9 GHz with turbo. This is substantially better than the 3.3 GHz the CPC sample worked with and even the chips back at New Horizon. The specific chip in this case is a F3 stepping and there is already a confirmed F4 stepping. In fact, the F4 stepping is reportedly clocked at 4 GHz boost and there is probably even more juice left in the tank.

If the 4 GHz speed is confirmed, Ryzen looks to a really strong competitor especially once you consider that you’re getting 8 cores and 16 threads at this speed. We also know that the TDP is already locked at under 100W so Ryzen will also be pretty efficient. The key to overclocking of course, is how much headroom AMD is leaving for us, which I am hoping is enough to push to at least 4.5 GHz. After all, we did see a 5 GHz score with a engineering sample on air.

Even better for AMD fans is that Ryzen was able to reach these clocks on a regular basis with so many cores. Once we trim a few cores out to quad or hex core Zen, I expect even higher speeds can be reached. I suspect Zen is the CPU we have all been waiting for to challenge the over half decade of Intel dominance.