WTF?! For the previous few days, the pc {hardware} microcosm of the web has been awash with theories about an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X that appeared within the Geekbench database on October 27. It hadn’t been seen, heard, or rumored wherever beforehand, which is nearly unprecedented. Had AMD actually made a 10-core Zen 4 CPU with out anybody understanding?
Nope. Chips and Cheese has come clear. They fooled Geekbench with a phony identify by spoofing the CPUID on what was truly a Ryzen 9 7950X system. In addition they disabled six cores and lowered the precision enhance overdrive clock by 350 MHz to make it look (and carry out!) like a center floor between the very actual 7700X and 7900X. I ponder what AMD’s engineers thought after they noticed the ‘leaked’ processor.
The Chips and Cheese staff admitted to altering the CPU’s identify with an inside benchmarking instrument initially designed to search out bottlenecks in CPU design. It has been obtainable on GitHub this complete time and nonetheless is, so if you wish to pull off the same prank, tag us on Twitter if you do. Listed below are some enjoyable, definitely-real processors that appeared within the Geekbench database this week.
Chips and Cheese’s instrument, known as PMCReader, abuses the best way benchmarking instruments like Geekbench learn a CPU’s identify on AMD methods. The CPUID for AMD processors is saved throughout six MSRs (Mannequin Particular Registers) that may every comprise eight ASCII characters (so no emoji, sadly). Applications can learn the CPUID by accessing these six registers. These MSRs are publicly obtainable in AMD’s PPR (Processor Programming Reference) papers, which clarify that the BIOS units them at boot.
Some AMD CPUs as previous as Bulldozer enable them to be written to arbitrarily, though some architectures are extra okay with identify adjustments than others. Some MSRs will be modified later by packages with admin privileges, together with these six registers. With PMCReader, you may give your CPU any identify with as much as 47 characters: take a look at Chips and Cheese’s hilarious instance beneath.
Chips and Cheese say their instrument can idiot Geekbench, Cinebench, AIDA64, HWMonitor, the Blender Benchmark, and nearly every part else they’ve examined. Thus far, the one exceptions to the rule have been HWiNFO and BenchMate (which borrows HWiNFO’s instruments) as a result of they supply the CPUID from a extra basic degree, very like the BIOS does.
It is truly been attainable to spoof these benchmark instruments for a very long time with extra than simply foolish names. Virtualization software program like VMWare or CPUs from non-major producers can falsify the CPU mannequin, household, stepping, and producer when you have the requisite experience. Nonetheless, with PMCReader, anybody can change the CPUID on an AMD CPU. Any more, it will be robust to inform if a leaked benchmark outcome from a web-based database is actual — which provides to the enjoyable in the event you ask me.