I just realised how AMD dealt with this issue for the Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series: Extended Frequency Range (XFR).
I think I am right in saying that XFR is not an technology in itself. It just a marketing term and describes the difference between the upper bound of the frequency range used by the Precision Boost algorithm and the "Max boost" number printed on the box.
AMD probably foresaw that these opportunistic and brief spikes to maximum frequency happen too rarely under load as to raise questions. So they simply scaled the number on the box back by 50-100 MHz and called the difference XFR.
However, AMD seems to have dropped the XFR notion for Ryzen 3000. Now the "Max boost" number printed on the box is the actual upper limit of the stock operating range.
Why did AMD drop XFR? I can see two arguments:
- To stop the confusion about the term. Many talked about XFR as if it was a technology implemented in silicon. Precision Boost is the name of the technology. XFR was just a marketing name for the headroom between the conservative Max Boost number printed on the box and the actual limit for stock operation.
- To be able to print a larger number on the box, i.e. the actual limit for stock operation.
I truly believe AMD fell short of their frequency targets for Zen 2. To allow for XFR (and ensure the advertised Max Boost was seen in actual workloads) they would have had to print numbers on the boxes 50-100 MHz below the already somewhat disappointing frequencies they achieved. Although much of the uplift from Zen 2 comes from the increased IPC, this is not printed on the box, so from a marketing standpoint, AMD may have felt that low Max Boost frequencies would look too bad.
Would you have preferred that AMD had retained some XFR headroom between the number on the box and the actual maximum boost frequency, even if that had meant lower numbers printed on the box?