For the last week or so there have been reports of a few AMD Ryzen 5 CPUs spotted in the wild that actually have more cores and threads than they should have. Both AMD Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 5 1600X processors are sold as 6 core / 12 thread parts, but for an unknown reason certain batches are actually shipping with 8 cores / 16 threads. This is what MSI have to say on the matter on their AMD blog space a few days ago:

A specific batch of Ryzen 5 1600 has been widely discussed lately that user will have a chance to get a free upgrade to 8-core CPU free of charge. The default CPU performance of this unique Ryzen 5 1600 CPU would be on par with AMD Ryzen 7 1700 according to the discussion over the internet. To confirm whether this news is fake or not, I managed to get this CPU from my local dealer today. Setting up my MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard using this CPU and voila, the CPU-Z tells me the Ryzen 5 1600 has 8 Core 16 Threads.

In terms of the HWBOT rankings, this development obviously throws a proverbial spanner in the works. If you are using an 8-core chip to compete in 6-core Global First Place rankings, you clearly have an unfair advantage. To remedy the situation, Strunkenbold (our tireless maintainer of the HWBOT Hardware Database) has created two new CPU categories to accommodate these two new product SKUs; AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (8 Cores) and AMD Ryzen 5 1600X (8 Cores) . It’s also relevant to note that we are not officially considering these as ‘unlocked’ processors as the user doesn’t have to actually do anything to gain the extra two cores. Unlike previous AMD processors where extra cores and performance could be unlocked, these two new models are basically just mistakenly labeled.