AMD is behind, and they'll use gimmicks where they can. Though since nvidia came up elsewhere, note that nvidia effectively advertises their "turbo" speed as the base and max speed, but in practice you'll often find it regulated to lower speeds for heat reasons.

In this case, however, it's an 8-core chip. Very few current workloads will saturate 8 cores (even on heavily taxed database servers), meaning that there is a good chance there is always thermal availability for individual cores (and thus individual threads) to be run at 5Ghz.

> *Very few current workloads will saturate 8 cores (even on heavily taxed database servers)

It depends. Some tasks, such as processing incoming HTTP requests and building responses, such as web servers do - are embarrassingly parallelizable. And if you have an architecture that scales horizontally, with enough network bandwidth, you can saturate how many cores you want.

Oh for sure there are cases that might saturate all cores. They're just incredibly rare, even on machines that are working at "100%". The case of web servers is an interesting one because benchmarks seldom see them actually running at 100% despite putting all of their combined resources at a problem -- there is usually something else synchronously slowing the flow, or a simple bottleneck like Gbps networking. Even on virtualization servers, one generally leaves enough headroom that the machine is nowhere near saturated.