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

djrockstar1 | 230 points

> 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.

jeremyjh | 6 hours ago

> 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.

Aurornis | 3 hours ago

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.

edgineer | 4 hours ago

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

SG- | 3 hours ago

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

shevy-java | 2 hours ago

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.

silexia | 2 hours ago

> 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.

theandrewbailey | 6 hours ago

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!

ocdtrekkie | 5 hours ago

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

blueflow | 6 hours ago

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!

PaulKeeble | 5 hours ago

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

ahoka | 5 hours ago