Look into any major CPU launch announcement, and you’ll notice a similar playbook: bold graphs, flashy slides and buzzwords that promise you life-changing performance. The chip manufacturing industry continues to rely on terms like hyper-threading, boost clocks* and nanometer process *when unveiling a new processor generation-on-generation. But how relevant is this data for the average user?

As per recent tests and experiments, for most everyday users like office multitaskers and light gamers, many of these features deliver more marketing sparkle than measurable speed that they can experience in their workflows and demanding games. Let’s have a look into the three most frequently touted marketing buzz terms and see what the benchmarks actually say.

Boost clock frequencies

Terms and conditions apply, greatly

CPU manufacturers are particularly fond of publishing the maximum boost clock as the highest single-core frequency achievable under ideal conditions, which include excellent cooling, reliably light load and the power headroom to support it. These figures are more often than not highlighted in product marketing to indicate the peak potential of the silicon.

While not misleading, this metric is certainly exaggerated and can leave you surprised if you happen to be someone who is factoring it in when shopping for a chip. It’s not that your CPU can’t reach the advertised boost clock speed, but rather it can’t *sustain *it beyond brief spikes to the peak due to power limits, thermal throttling and algorithms designed to maintain the power budget.

Independent benchmarks show that all-core sustains are typically 10–20% below the advertised maxima (that is, your ‘boost frequency’), which amount to 5–10% performance gains in gaming and productivity tasks for average configurations. The high-end Ryzen 9 9900X, for example, is rated for 5.6 GHz peaks. However, the chip settles in the range of 5.2–5.3 GHz in multithreaded workloads, which translates roughly to a 2–10% performance uplift above base. The Intel territory shows similar variances, as multithreaded frequencies on the Core Ultra 9 285K trail behind advertised boost frequencies by 5.2% (P-cores) and 19.2% (E-cores).

Under the right conditions, of course, a Tesla Roadster can go from 0 to 100 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds and reach a top speed of 250 miles an hour. Certainly a nice-to-have, but how often do you accelerate up to that speed on your commute from home to work? In the case of both the CPU and the Roadster, you will find that boost clocks and the top speed are neither commonly sustained nor crucial for everyday workloads.

Hyperthreading/Simultaneous Multithreading

You don’t always need 16 cores and 32 threads

In AMD and Intel’s marketing book, simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and hyperthreading have occupied a permanent spot of late. Laptops and pre-built PC manufacturers like to promote increased thread counts as a way to boost multitasking capability. What’s worth knowing is, however, that these extra threads share the same core resources and can sometimes lead to contention rather than true parallelism, depending on the nature of your tasks. Those cases call for a little more context than what retailers are willing to provide you with.

Across many applications, SMT and hyperthreading can offer meaningful benefit (especially in creativity-oriented tasks, which are able to exploit many threads where individual cores have idle time). On the other hand, latency-sensitive tasks, or in tasks wherein threads compete heavily for shared resources (such as gaming), the gains may shrink or even reverse.

This can happen in CPU-bound games, especially if your rig is equipped with more than eight physical cores. NVIDIA notes the reason behind this is a thread count determination algorithm that has not been adjusted to account for variable core counts, asymmetrical caches by AMD, heterogenous P/E cores in the newer Intel chips, complex scheduling algorithms and power management techniques in the native OS. Furthermore, they also note that systems running more than eight cores can see performance gains of up to 15% by limiting CPU threads. So, while SMT and hyperthreading can boost certain specialized workflows involving video-editing and 3D modeling (which support multithreading), they can limit or offer no benefit at all to others.

Nanometer process

It’s not apples to apples anymore

Among CPU specifications, the manufacturing node garners a lot of attention, and has surged in popularity in marketing. Phrases like “built on advanced 5 nanometer process” seem to suggest a generational leap in performance and efficiency, and once upon a time, that is precisely what it stood for.

That time was a decade ago, when the nanometer value referred to the gate length of a transistor. Shrinking this length meant the silicon is faster, denser and more energy-efficient. Today, however, it is largely a naming convention that bears very little connection to a physical dimension. That is not to say that smaller nanometer processes *within *the product lineup of a *single *manufacturer doesn’t represent a better performing and more efficient chip, but rather the fact that comparing nanometer processes across different manufacturers has become arduous, especially since this is a comparison one would expect to undertake when shopping for a chip—thanks to the near-baffling nomenclature.

Each foundry defines its nodes differently. TSMC’s N5 process, referring to a 5 nanometer node (which forms the basis of the Ryzen 7000 series processors), differs vastly from Samsung’s 5 nm process, with the former outperforming the latter in power efficiency and transistor density. Similarly, the Intel 4 process refers not to a 4 nm node, but follows a 7 nm process instead. This broad inconsistency makes it nearly impossible to judge performance based on nanometer figures alone.

Know which specs matter to you

For most everyday users, flashy numbers in CPU marketing rarely translate into tangible performance gains. The advertising language feels more geared towards the competition and less tailored to the needs of the consumer. Savvy buyers now need to delve a little deeper and prioritize independent benchmarks, focus on their workflow and their needs off the clock to avoid paying top dollar for features that wouldn’t make a difference to their computing needs.