Mac powered by AMD Ryzen 9 5950X spotted running at 6.0GHz

[HEXUS]

Offers up great Geekbench scores but how extreme was the cooling solution?

Read more.

[[GSV]Trig]

Do we think Apple will really shift from Intel?
IF they do that's another feather in AMD's cap, some of the stuff they are doing this year is really setting them up for a good 2021...

[Skyflier]

Trig;304]Do we think Apple will really shift from Intel?
IF they do that's another feather in AMD's cap, some of the stuff they are doing this year is really setting them up for a good 2021...

Maybe in the short term, but i think they've already pointed at moving towards having their own ARM based CPU's throughout the range and not just in their phones & iPad's etc. This was before Nvidia bought ARM though so who knows.

[Jonj1611]

I thought Apple were going back to making their own processors?

[[GSV]Trig]

Maybe in the short term, but i think they've already pointed at moving towards having their own ARM based CPU's throughout the range and not just in their phones & iPad's etc. This was before Nvidia bought ARM though so who knows.

Even if it is short term, and they do end up actually making their own CPU's across the whole product lineup, the move from Intel to AMD speaks volumes.

Be more interesting long term to see how they play with NVidia if they do get ARM, if there's any sort of knock on effect with Apple supporting NVidia GPU's over AMD's..

[Jonj1611]

Is it not possible its nothing to do with Apple and someone running a Hackingtosh or is that not possible anymore?

[[GSV]Trig]

Is it not possible its nothing to do with Apple and someone running a Hackingtosh or is that not possible anymore?

I did think that, it would be something for internal testing, there were also "leaks" of a Surface Pro type device rocking AMD stuff as well so probably not read too much into it, although MS did release AMD powered kit not long after those leaks.

[edmundhonda]

Is it not possible its nothing to do with Apple and someone running a Hackingtosh or is that not possible anymore?

With pre-release hardware and probably LN2 cooling? Seems unlikely, but who knows.

3950x has been clocked at 6ghz, just. 5.6ghz for something that could finish an r15 run, 4.7ghz for the same on water.

[lumireleon]

Apple on AMD?? that will mess their OVER-marketed Thunderbolt fiasco

[LSG501]

Um... it's pretty obvious this is a hackintosh running an AMD processor, some other sites are even saying that in their articles and have reproduced the entire geekbench image/results showing the motherboard info etc.

Hackintosh has had AMD support for ages, engineering samples are usually 'fairly easy' to get hold of too these days.... and lets be honest, it's supposedly been done on an 'imac pro' (look at model info)...

[Kato-2]

I thought Apple were going back to making their own processors?

Not for the pro products, the Arm chips are competitive with laptop CPU's but not workstation class hardware.

I'm sure over the years Apple has experimented with AMD CPU's in Mac's, doesn't meant they will release a product based on it, time will tell.

[JGJones]

Apple indeed are going to be switching to ARM for their machines - starting with laptops and later onto desktops (their video announcing it had a Mac Mini running on ARM).

Even though Nvidia might be buying ARM - it doesn't matter as Apple have already gotten a arch licence that allow them to make their own ARM chips based on the instruction set and they are very good at it - their ARM chips seemingly are far ahead of what Qualcomm comes out with.

In addition they will be able to craft their operating systems to work specifically with the hardware so that's another boost on top.

WIll it be faster than high end x86 desktop chips? I don't think it will be, but I don't think it will be that far behind either.

It certainly would be a huge boost in laptops (battery life, cooling requirements etc), but desktops is going to be very interesting to see how that goes.

I think the main difference in speed between ARM vs x86 isn't that important - the x86 is a very generalised CPU that does everything, but as we can see in their iPhones - their ARM CPU's aren't necessarily that generalised - they have hardware acceleration for specific tasks such as image processing, video processing, AR processing etc etc which take load off the CPU itself.

A dedicated core that does hardware acceleration for a specific task is always going to trash a generalised CPU *for that specific* task so if Apple market their iMac as being a image/video editing machine - it'll have those cores that may give it the edge over x86 powered desktops without hardware acceleration. I am quite interested to see what they will do.

[ultrasbm]

Maybe Apple will be able to use an Apple CPU as a co-processor to the AMD 5950X... ;-)

One can only dream

[Mark3p]

It’s definitely a hackintosh as it’s running iMac Pro 1,1 smbios and that device is exclusively Intel motherboard. A total non-news article.

[Stu C]

Isn't the main focus of the article that someone has run a Zen 3 chip at 6GHz, not the fact that it is on an Apple machine?

[Jonj1611]

Maybe but the article title says Mac powered by AMD Ryzen so guess talking about it being on an Apple machine is ok