The End of High-Performance Overclocking May Be Nigh

by Joel Hruska

A little over seven years ago, I wrote a story called “ Physics, Ivy Bridge, and the Slow Death of Overclocking.” The argument it made, in essence, was that the realities of process node scaling were steadily going to worsen and overclocking headroom would continue to decline. A recent update from Silicon Lottery makes the same argument, in starker terms.

Silicon Lottery is a website that sells binned CPUs at specific frequencies and voltages, for both AMD and Intel products. Think of it as a one-stop shop for overclockers who prefer to pay for a CPU at known-good frequencies rather than a chip they’ve still got to take a chance on themselves. The company has released a price list for its upcoming Ryzen CPUs, which are currently listed as out-of-stock. Yes, some of these speed grades are listed for cheaper than the actual base Ryzen 7/Ryzen 9 CPUs. No, I don’t have an explanation for that.

The overall clocks are low, as we expected. There was a profound mismatch between AMD’s clock expectations for Matisse and what the enthusiast community predicted would be possible. AMD told us at E3 that it didn’t expect to gain clock…