AMD preparing 5GHZ CPU?

[The Stilt]

This is getting ridiculous.

Unless there is a major node overhaul (which reduces the power consumption by 30-50%) there is absolutely no way AMD can release a 8-core FX clocked to 5.0GHz. Nothing indicates that there would be a new node version coming and releasing one would not make any sense anyway. There is no point in using the limited resources to anything else but on the Gen. 3.

A nasty thing to say but using the limited resources on Piledriver would be like force feeding hay to a dead horse.

Currently the fastest 8-core FX is clocked to 4.0GHz.
At this frequency the 125W TDP envelope is already fully used in well optimized multithreaded applications (such as rendering or video encoding), there is no headroom really.

A proper binning of the dies can make around 200MHz of difference on current Piledriver dies.
The additional scalability comes purely from the lower leakage properties of the binned parts.

The current Piledriver cores do not scale well beyond 4.6GHz, which seem to be the critical frequency really.
They can be pushed beyond that but the increase in the power consumption & emitted thermal power can no longer be justified by the resulting performance increase. Beyond this point the performance-power curve is anything but linear.

We might see a 8-core FX (Piledriver) clocked to 4.3 - 4.5GHz (base frequency) at some point, but anything higher than that is very unlikely.

Even if AMD could produce a 8-core FX clocked to 5.0GHz, there would not be any motherboards for the chip.
A 5.0GHz 8-core Piledriver FX consumes 180W - 200W of power during Cinebench R11.5 for example (DCR Pmax, from CPU VRM).

In some applications the power consumption can be even 30% higher than that so the motherboard design has to have enough of headroom to accomodate the difference + the design margin. The motherboard would need to be able to deliver 235W - 260W of constant power. After the average conversion (VRM efficiency) loss the total VRM input power would be 294W - 325W (24.5 - 27A from the 12V rail).

The power dissipation of the CPU VRM alone would be 36W - 46W.

There are only couple of motherboards which can temporarily manage such of power requirements.
Even these motherboards cannot support such power requirements reliably for extended periods of time.

Having a 5.0GHz Piledriver based system in daily use is far from impossible.
It just requires conditions of which 99.95% of the users cannot attain.
A high performance custom watercooling system for the CPU and the motherboard (CPU VRM).

AMD and an enthusiast also have a slightly different definition for the term "long term reliability and stability".