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

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1orc6jl/my_friends_and_i_accidentally_faked_the_ryzen_7/

290•djrockstar1•3mo ago

Comments

jeremyjh•3mo ago

> 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.

comrade1234•3mo ago

By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.

resoluteteeth•3mo ago

How does that distinction matter here?

kinematikk•3mo ago

It’s a different situation if you are researching something and chatting about that vs talking about something while in a bar for example

Retr0id•3mo ago

They are two different situations but why is the distinction meaningful here? I rarely even remember the venue of most conversations, just that it happened.

BolexNOLA•3mo ago

Because for a lot of us it’s hard to imagine finding a half dozen or so people who can talk in person like that outside of a conference or workplace. Discord facilitates that because it assembles people based on interests and such. You’re just going to more easily have that kind of conversation than you would “out in the real world.”

My guess is they are functionally saying “this probably happened on discord if anybody is wondering how this is even possible and not made up for effect” but I might be interpreting too much

setopt•3mo ago

Well it’s not so far fetched if the friends are people you studied with and have common interests with, but don’t currently work together with.

I have good friends that love to discuss highly technical topics over a beer or whiskey.

BolexNOLA•3mo ago

My friends and I share interests but they can’t all talk about the relative pros/cons of full frame vs. cropped sensors in digital cinema with me. That’s kind of the framing here if that makes sense. We share a lot of interest and can talk in depth about certain topics, but there are plenty of topics that I am interested in or just know a lot more about that none of them can really discuss with me, so I have to find those communities elsewhere

esseph•3mo ago

> I have good friends

Ahhh, I see, I see...

ant6n•3mo ago

It’s easier to have very specialized friends of they are geographically far away.

hrimfaxi•3mo ago

I don't see what distance has to do with it. I had a number of specialized friends in close proximity at university.

trenchpilgrim•3mo ago

Presumably because they all traveled there for a temporary part of their lives. And after university, they presumably scattered to the places where they built their careers and families.

esseph•3mo ago

"at university"

Clearly proximity is involved

bee_rider•3mo ago

>> 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.

I think they interpreted “as do we all” as pointing out humorously that this is an unusual friend group. So, speculation that it might have formed online makes sense, because online spaces can sometimes facilitate that sort of thing.

kuschku•3mo ago

Have you ever been in a hackspace? That's where you'll usually find such discussions IRL.

Other examples include "let's build a submarine" https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11828-how_to_build_a_submarine_a..., creating your own 2000s style phone ringtone/wallpaper subscription service https://blamba.de/ or running toslink audio over regular long-distance fiber links https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/sfp-experiment-ultra-long-ra...

0xf7ff•3mo ago

OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).

If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!

degamad•3mo ago

I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.

zwnow•3mo ago

Idk all my friends are alcoholics and we only talk about stupid stuff

aaomidi•3mo ago

How do I join yall

trenchpilgrim•3mo ago

In my experience:

1. Start building stuff that is hard to build that requires touching these niche topics. Especially stuff you don't know how to build

2. As you encounter problems, you'll have to scour for solutions (AI doesn't know these things due to lack of training data). In the process you will find people who are also working on these problems. Ask these people well-formed, intelligent questions.

cortesoft•3mo ago

I am skeptical of your second claim here… if you can “scour for solutions”, and you find something about it on the internet, then AI could find it the same way.

lelandbatey•3mo ago

Just cause the AI could find the info definitely does not mean it will find and apply that knowledge correctly to solve a problem.

I find AI shockingly bad ad searching the web, as SEO blogspam sites heavily pollute AI context windows, while relevant and important resources are typically very densely presented reference material which must be constantly revisited.

adastra22•3mo ago

It doesn’t need to. It has already all the fundamental knowledge it needs. Just set it up on a system with an editable proc file system and it would be able to figure it out.

adastra22•3mo ago

Yeah AI definitely can figure this stuff out. Doesn’t mean you can’t also seek out people.

trenchpilgrim•3mo ago

A lot of the solutions are buried in places AI can't scrape or train on. Like inside people's brains or inside private codebases or chatrooms not open to bots. However you can find these people and the products and services they're making and start talking to them.

shakna•3mo ago

Most LLMs can't even count parentheses properly to build basic Lispy stuff. Building something niche like a logic solver in Scheme macros only? Forgetaboutit.

denkmoon•3mo ago

Are AI companies training off discord chat history? There's so much technical information locked up in them these days.

rft•3mo ago

Where do you think this stuff [1] is cooked up? To be fair, we mostly use Signal though.

[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils

trenchpilgrim•3mo ago

This is exactly the kind of conversation I can have with some coworkers and in some Discord channels. Aren't people awesome?

PufPufPuf•3mo ago

God forbid people have hobbies

blueflow•3mo ago

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

vbezhenar•3mo ago

Leaks can't be trustworthy.

swiftcoder•3mo ago

Leaks can however be verified, which is how journalism is supposed to work (otherwise it's just sparkling gossip)

sunaookami•3mo ago

Tech journalism was always infamously bad.

dylan604•3mo ago

If a tech journalist actually understood their subject matter at a competent level, they wouldn't be a journo and go out and get a job in that subject matter dramatically increasing their salary. Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, become journalists???

edelbitter•3mo ago

I sometimes use lwn.net as an exemplary showcase of things non-tech journalists should learn (e.g.: add references whenever paraphrasing material some or all readers might have direct access to)

theandrewbailey•3mo 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.

RealStickman_•3mo ago

You can likely put a 5800X3D or 5700X3D in the same motherboard and get a massive performance upgrade

mikepurvis•3mo ago

I’m rocking an AM4 build still and very happy with the bump I got from going to a 5800X and maxing out the RAM (primarily for productivity use rather than gaming).

e145bc455f1•3mo ago

5700X3D is great for gaming, but for programming 5900XT will be nicer. You can run make -j32 :)

dlcarrier•3mo ago

Great for when you're installing Linux from source.

I hope I'm never working on a project where -j32 on a 5900XT is noticeably faster than than -j16 on a 5700X3D.

Then again, -j1 is nice, when you need to time a break. (https://xkcd.com/303/)

PaulKeeble•3mo 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!

gblargg•3mo ago

Don't publish benchmarks until a few data points for the same model come in from different sources, and are roughly the same?

lazide•3mo ago

Publishing is ‘coming in from different sources’ though?

Or do you think journalists are going to wait for ‘peer review’ for their breaking news?

gblargg•2mo ago

I meant that the benchmark sites could wait to show data for new hardware until multiple readings are logged from different accounts.

ocdtrekkie•3mo 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!

edgineer•3mo 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.

weird-eye-issue•3mo ago

> So it goes: unintentional data leak

Aurornis•3mo ago

The two articles I saw about the 9700X3D each called out the discrepancies in the listing, like the high clock speed.

The mainstream journalism about this was actually pretty good

SG-•3mo ago

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

bee_rider•3mo ago

A lot of mainstream tech journalism seems to be done by people that are just sort of… excited hobbyists or something. Neither techs nor journalists.

hamdingers•3mo ago

It's all content marketing.

Aurornis•3mo 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.

hnuser123456•3mo ago

This is all extra confusing (as to why people republished this) because a 9850X3D was already rumored a couple weeks ago as a higher binned 9800X3D, which would actually make sense, as well as a 9950X3D2 with dual X3D CCDs.

0xf7ff•3mo ago

Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.

An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.

silexia•3mo 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.

behindsight•3mo ago

> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

shevy-java•3mo ago

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

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