Ten-Year Old RTC Bug Shows AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU Running At 6.3 GHz

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPUs have a boost frequency of 5.7 GHz, so when a Russian gamer discovered that his processor had boosted to 6.3 GHz frequencies, it was found that a Real-Time Clock, or RTC, bug dating back to 2013 was afflicting the chip. The glitch was problematic because the HWBot overclocking platform denied any benchmark test results completed in Microsoft Windows 8.

Not only was Windows 8 present in 2013, but the same bug was affecting Intel's 4th Gen Haswell CPUs. The bug was initially believed to have been eliminated by Microsoft, but ten years later, the same bug has made an appearance. This raises the question of whether Microsoft did fix the glitch or merely found a workaround to "nerf" the slightly boosted CPU numbers.

The reason that HWBot's platform denied any results from Windows 8 was due to the inability to entrust that both the CPU frequencies and benchmark scores were not altered as users would be able to make a 15% adjustment during tests, with Intel's processors being the most affected by the glitch. The images below show the spikes in Windows Task Manager and CPU-Z software.

Kuai Technology explains how to reproduce the same results with AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X CPUs in the simplest terms. The tech website instructs users to boost the CPU to its peak frequency and then place the system to sleep. Immediately after the system goes into Sleep mode, reactivate the system, and the boost frequency will increase, as evident in Windows Task Manager.

This discovery can fool software like Cinebench and Corona, which raises another question as to if any recent results from those platforms and others have been afflicted by this glitch, granting inaccurate scores across all benchmarking tests.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU retains its healthy 16-core and 32-thread count from the previous two generations. The CPU will feature an impressive base frequency of 4.5 GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.7 GHz (5.85 GHz F-Max), making it 200 MHz faster than Intel's Alder Lake Core i9-12900KS which has a boost frequency of 5.5 GHz on a single-core. As for the cache, the CPU comes with 80 MB of that, which includes 64 MB from L3 (32 MB per CCD) and 16 MB from L2 (1 MB per core). The CPU has an official MSRP of $699.99 US, and you can read our review here.

News Source: Kuai Technology