Their sales and marketing seems to have gotten them into this mess. They wanted to tout an increase in clock speeds as consumers are numbers driven but in reality, they can't get there often are having to stretch the truth.
If the 3950x chips are heavily binned 3900x as you'd expect, their ability will be the final call on the desktop line up.
Going forward, I doubt you'll see anything out of AMD communications without a fine tooth comb parsing by their legal team.
Good chips but big PR baggage to carry forward. Intel would be outright stupid to not pounce on this.
Yeah I definitely think there's an element of this. If they advertised identical clocks to last generation the chips still would've been ~15% faster but they probably thought less informed consumers might not be convinced they're worth buying.
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Here's my pitch to be in charge of AMD's marketing: literally stop advertising clocks. Clock speeds are ultimately irrelevant, what is important is performance. Obviously the clock speeds can be quoted on our website or in spec sheets, etc. but it doesn't need to be in the name of the product like it is now. We're supposed to highlight our strengths, not weaknesses. For example, we'd want OcUK to list the product as:
Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 65 W (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail
rather than the current:
Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail
We have a core count and efficiency advantage over Intel, so let's advertise that. We already differentiate performance with model numbers: an R5 3600 is better (somehow) to an R5 2600, this is obvious to anyone comparing the model numbers. If we want to make it even clearer, we could always call it an R5 3620 or something. "But how will people compare our products to Intel's?" By looking at prices and reviews; we certainly don't want people to compare them based on GHz! Stop playing into Intel's hands by participating in the GHz war: we will never win that battle. We can push clocks all we want, but we need to stop reinforcing the idea in consumers' minds that performance is wholly or mostly down to clock speed.
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They could even start using model numbers that reflect relative performance based on some benchmark like they did in the Athlon days. e.g. Ryzen 5 4xxx where xxx is some multiplier based on something (e.g. 100 = performance of an R5 1600 or something). This gets tricky though because what benchmark do you use to be fair but also demonstrate a wide range of scenarios?