CANARD PC HARDWARE, a French hardware magazine has confirmed through and Easter Egg hidden on their Ryzen feature that the chip is able to achieve overclocks of at least 5GHz on air. On page 10 of the digital magazine as well as the physical version, a code of 1’s and 0’s or binary code can be found on the top of the page.
The code, which is as follows “010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111” when translated through a binary to plain text converter turns out to say “ZenOC@Air=5G“.
The entire article itself is based on an early engineering sample of the chip that the magazine managed to get their hands on. Since this information was left as an Easter Egg it sort of raises questions. We would definitely want to know what voltage the chip was at, how many core, and how many of those cores were enabled, was the overclock stable, what cooling was used, etc.
So many questions are left unanswered, but if anything this gives more hype to Ryzen and makes things look even more promising.
I would bet that’s a single-core OC. But even so that’s pretty impressive for a chip that is nominally clocked around 3.15-3.4, and an engineering sample with aircooling to boot. That’s a good early start, it shows the cores are at least capable of high clocks. Of course we won’t know more until we see a large sampling of true reviews in a couple of months. They don’t need to beat Intel, they just need to come really close and undercut them on price. Like the Phenom II days.