On December 28th, enterprising redditor /u/lolwut996633 discovered an easter egg in Canard PC’s Ryzen engineering sample review (source, Reddit.com).
Looking at the binary line-break that was hidden in plain site on Page 10, each digit was manually input into a binary to plain text converter.
The digits, 010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111 translate to ZenOC@Air=5G.
If this easter egg holds true, expect AMD’s 8-Core Ryzen CPU to join the short list of Intel processors that can successfully hit 5.0GHz on AIR.
At this point, I can understand your skepticism but it’s worth mentioning that Canard PC may have some form of industry insider source that has repeatedly helped them get the inside scoop.
Back in March of this year, Canard PC also let slip, in the same exact way, that Intel was going to license AMD GPUs before the world got wind of it 9 months later in December and long before anyone even knew what to make of it. The binary message was extremely cryptic at the time, “Intel GPU = AMD”. As such, this most recent easter egg should be considered a pretty credible leak.
Now, hype train aside, it’s worth mentioning that the review was written using an early engineering sample that was clocked to 3.1GHz. However, we don’t know if they successfully hit 5.0GHz with this exact chip or if a little birdy has told them that the final stepping will hit 5.0GHz on AIR. In all honesty, there are quite a few variables at play here:
- We don’t know if 5.0GHz was hit on the 8 core or the 4 core variant.
- We don’t know if this elusive number is exclusive to just the engineering samples.
- We don’t know if the retail versions will use the same thermal interface material as it’s Bristol Ridge AM4 brother.
- We don’t know if all cores were clocked at 5.0GHz.
- We don’t know what voltage was needed to hit 5.0GHz.
- We don’t know if it used AMD’s 80mm Wraith HSF or an aftermarket cooler.
- We don’t know if the processor was 24/7 stable.
In any case, this is exciting news to enter the new year with and we hope to have more Ryzen news to share during CES next week!
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