But there’s a fifth “five” in the mix: AMD says Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be able to boost above 5GHz, making them the company’s first desktop chips to do so. During their Computex presentation, AMD demonstrated a 5.5GHz clock speed while playing Ghostwire: Tokyo, matching the 5.5GHz turbo of Intel’s Core i9-12900KS. Not that megahertz matter much in terms of performance – both Intel and AMD have multiple laptop CPUs that can turbo to 5GHz, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re faster at tasks than a lower-clocked desktop CPU.
What should truly make a difference: Zen 4 will have “more than 15%” higher single-threaded performance than Zen 3 due to improved clock speed and generation-on-generation process improvements (single-thread still being the most important metric for many apps, particularly games). However, the new processors may have higher power consumption: the new AM5 motherboards may now provide up to 170W of power to the chips, up from 142W previously claimed.
