This is a follow up to our story on Tuesday regarding the publishing of the first 'official' AMD Ryzen CPU (Engineering Sample) review by French tech print magazine Canard PC. Since the magazine has been out and pawed over by its purchasers, more details about Ryzen have come to light. However, the most stirring extra piece of information is mysteriously hidden inside a binary string printed nonchalantly above a feature image on page 10 of the magazine's printed article (see below).
Reddit user lolwut996633 was first to notice the 0s and 1s were more than an ornamental flourish added to the image of a CPU and motherboard. The 0s and 1s sequence was as follows:
010110100110010101101110010011110100001101000000
010000010110100101110010001111010011010101000111
Putting the above string through a binary to plain text converter results in the following:
ZenOC@Air=5G
So there you can see it, plain as day. The Canard PC review editors have slyly hidden the above eyebrow raising statement - suggesting that their engineering sample Ryzen CPU was capable of hitting 5GHz with traditional air cooling.
Unfortunately this brief message raises many questions about how attainable and sustainable such an OC is. Did they overclock the processor with all cores enabled or not? What kind of voltage was required? How hot did the processor run? Finally there is, of course, the question whether this cryptic binary tease might even be just a meaningless joke…
