Well, there’s some bad news for AMD ultra-enthusiasts. The shipping date for the Ryzen 9 3950X has been pushed back to November. This is something we knew. What’s new is that the reason for the delay has been found to be unsatisfactory clock speeds, not supply-side issues as was earlier reported by industry insiders.
There’s been a minor PR controversy over AMD’s decision to be, well, a bit misleading with the advertised clock speeds for third-gen Ryzen. It was found that few processors in the hands of users actually hit rated speeds. A BIOS fix was eventually released which went some way towards fixing the issue. And you can, of course, manually tweak clocks by overclocking. But still, this is a serious issue and points to AMD having some trouble with higher-binned 7nm Zen 2 yields. The Ryzen 3950X is a premium product, and it’s meant to have not just many cores, but also run at higher clock speeds.
Getting a 16-core processor to run in excess of 4 GHz is no mean feat. Even if 7nm yields are satisfactory, AMD might be running up against other issues, like poor cooling or power consumption. We don’t know for sure at the moment. What we do know is that it’s going to be another couple of months before we see the
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