Earlier quoted context omitted.
2990WX was a weird ultra-NUMA setup where half the dies had no direct memory access at all. Part of the gain will have been fixing that - particularly on Windows where the scheduler did not understand this configuration at all (Linux results have always been much better). Another part is the power consumption and resulting higher clocks. The 2990WX was basically power limited, the new chips are on 7nm which will dras…
Wouldn't the higher clocks impact single-core performance? The article claims that's about the same. I suppose the userbenchmark single-core perf test[1] (the article links to some userbenchmark.com results) could just be a bad test; I'm unfamiliar with it. (It could also be that 2990WX wasn't power/heat limited on a single core, and neither is 3xxx; but say, at 16 core 100% clock, 3xxx can go higher than 2990WX due…
AMD is advertising the absolute highest that any core on the die can hit under extremely light load for an absolute instant. Sustained single-core clocks will be 100-200 MHz less and sustained all-core will be significantly less. Most cores on a chip are not capable of sustaining the advertised clockrate even under severe voltage and even for instant loads, only the "preferred core" on a chip. There is a significant "binning effect" not just between chips, but between individual cores on a chip.
Intel and previous generations of AMD cores used to advertise the sustained single-core rate, which could be achieved on any of the cores. This is a changeup to how the clockrate has been advertised.
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgSoZAdk_E8
followup after a patch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LesYlfhv3o
As such the clockrates may be significantly different from what you're intuiting based on the advertising.