My friends and I accidentally faked the Ryzen 7 9700X3D leaks

[jeremyjh]

> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.

As do we all.

[degamad]

I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.

[trenchpilgrim]

This is exactly the kind of conversation I can have with some coworkers and in some Discord channels. Aren't people awesome?

[rft]

Where do you think this stuff [1] is cooked up? To be fair, we mostly use Signal though.

[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils

[PufPufPuf]

God forbid people have hobbies

[comrade1234]

By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.

[Aurornis]

> so, to test, one of us took a heavily PBO'd 9700X and changed /proc/cpuinfo to be a "9700X3D" and ran a Passmark run to see if the software would be fooled...

The two articles I saw about this both emphasized that the high clock speed (from the PBO) was inconsistent with the name of the CPU that implied it would be lower performance than the 9800X3D.

Most of the sites I check regularly have been pretty good about calling out inconsistent leaks or rumors, contrary to the “all journalism is trash” comments down below. On the other hand, if you were following someone who presented this singular benchmark result as proof of something without looking at the details, it might be a good time to reconsider the quality of your sources. I did see some lazy Twitter personalities parroting the result without any actual thought.

[hnuser123456]

This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.

[0xf7ff]

Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.

An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.

[edgineer]

So it goes: unintentional data leak. Data leak pipeline becomes common knowledge. Then manipulation.

"New CPU in Passmark" news has become so regular, I've long since assumed that they are not leaks at all, but intentional product hype.

EXIF metadata is editable, too. Similar that it could be useful intelligence, but it is very easy to deceive others with it.

[Aurornis]

The two articles I saw about the 9700X3D each called out the discrepancies in the listing, like the high clock speed.

The mainstream journalism about this was actually pretty good

[weird-eye-issue]

> So it goes: unintentional data leak

No

[SG-]

probably doesn't help that 'tech journalists' are some of the worst with very little journalism background.

[bee_rider]

A lot of mainstream tech journalism seems to be done by people that are just sort of… excited hobbyists or something. Neither techs nor journalists.

[hamdingers]

It's all content marketing.

[silexia]

A major takeaway from this is that the news media can easily be misled and report false information. Everyone sees this whenever there's a news article in a field they are an expert in, but then they trust all of the other articles in fields they are not.

[behindsight]

> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

[ocdtrekkie]

I was hoping for a slightly budgetier X3D chip but I went and got a plain 9700 a few months ago. I realized I probably don't need the performance and the extra power budget/efficiency of using a 65W chip was nice.

Clearly there's a market for a 9700X3D though!

[theandrewbailey]

> I feel badly for all of the people who may have held off on a 9800X3D purchase because of this Passmark that we thought wouldn't work.

I'm considering a new build soon, but RAM prices are out of control, like they've more than doubled since June! (Damn AI bubble...) I guess I'll have to get by with my Ryzen 1800X a bit longer.

[RealStickman_]

You can likely put a 5800X3D or 5700X3D in the same motherboard and get a massive performance upgrade

[shevy-java]

I want to 3D print my own hardware on the nanoscale level.

[pseidemann]

Journalism is a crucial part for a free world.

[BSDobelix]

Tech/Game/Movie journalism is mostly trash because they are like a external Spokesperson for the paying business, often they even get the text that they should publish.

However calling all journalists "trash" i wildly unfair for people like Scott Horton, Patrik Baab or David Talbot....and manymany more.

[Cheer2171]

Let me try one: Software is trash and programmers are happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.

See how you sound?

[jccalhoun]

Where did they lie? Someone posted some benchmarks. They reported on the appearance of benchmarks that indicate a new chip. Being wrong is not lying.

[visarga]

> Journalism is thrash and journalists are happy to lie about anything if they have the smallest amount of plausible deniability.

Funny, if you see the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI, they act like they are still doing serious journalism.

[blueflow]

inb4 "Why don't people trust news anymore?" this why

[sunaookami]

Tech journalism was always infamously bad.

[vbezhenar]

Leaks can't be trustworthy.

[PaulKeeble]

Passmark is clearly going to have to do a security pass on its CPU information now to make this at least a little bit harder!

[gblargg]

Don't publish benchmarks until a few data points for the same model come in from different sources, and are roughly the same?