I hate when headlines (well, people in general) use codenames for hardware. I’m apparently supposed to know off the top of my head that Arrow Lake is the newest Intel Core Ultra series cpus released a couple of months ago.
I like the idea that people use “up to” because in theory, there is a finite chance that anything could happen due to the quantum nature of particles/waves.
It’s within the realm of mathematical feasibility that several electrons could be activated beyond their normal activation energy, causing an overall effect of the processor speeding up. Therefore they should say “up to 3e10x2 faster”. I wonder how that will hold up in court.
A lot of things go into benchmarks:
- RAM speed
- other services running on the machine
- CPU lottery
- ambient temperature and cooling efficiency
This isn’t necessarily quantum level behavior or even the processor isn’t “speeding up,” it’s just being used more efficiently. In this case, it’s better use of CPU threads.
I’d like to note I’ve been playing on a Ryzen 9 9950X/Radeon 7900 XTX on Linux, and it’s been going pretty well! With a couple of tweaks, it looks and runs great. Seems like they’ve turned it around a whole lot since launch.
