Listening to users on how our products operate in the real world is very important to AMD. Your collective voice is heard and is key to how we develop and build great products like our recently launched 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processors.
With our newest processors, we set out to build a family of products that offered outstanding performance and amazing value across a wide number of applications – and from the user response and third party reviews we have done just that. Alongside this feedback on the incredible performance of 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen, we have also heard from some users who expressed concerns about their ability to hit the maximum boost frequency of their product. We understand how this can be confusing and frustrating for those users, so we are providing more context on how we set the boost frequencies on 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processors, and what you should expect to see.
Our processors perform intelligent real-time analysis of the CPU temperature, motherboard voltage regulator current (amps), socket power (watts), loaded cores, and workload intensity to maximize performance from millisecond to millisecond. As part of our manufacturing process, each Ryzen 3000 series is tested at a set of voltage and temperature specifications to ensure the processor is capable of operating to the base and maximum boost frequency specified.
Achieving this maximum boost frequency, and the duration of time the processor sits at this maximum boost frequency, will vary from PC to PC based on many factors such as having adequate voltage and current headroom, the ambient temperature, installing the most up-to-date software and BIOS, and especially the application of thermal paste and the effectiveness of the system/processor cooling solution.
As we noted in this blog, we also resolved an issue in our BIOS that was reducing maximum boost frequency by 25-50MHz depending on workload. We expect our motherboard partners to make this update available as a patch in two to three weeks. Following the installation of the latest BIOS update, a consumer running a bursty, single threaded application on a PC with the latest software updates and adequate voltage and thermal headroom should see the maximum boost frequency of their processor. PCMark® 10 is a good, bursty workload proxy for a user to test the maximum boost frequency of their processor in their system. It is expected that if users run a workload like Cinebench, which runs for an extended period of time, the operating frequencies may be less than the maximum throughout the run.
As always, if a user has a concern about the performance or operation of their AMD Ryzen processor, we ask that they contact us here for technical support and assistance.
As the hundreds of independent reviews and online comments and ratings from users highlight, Ryzen 3000 series processors deliver leadership performance across productivity, gaming, and content creation workloads. We are incredibly proud of the product our talented engineers have designed, and we think Ryzen processors are the clear choice for anyone looking to buy the highest performance processors based on real-world application performance.
