Looks like gigahertz wars are calling, but with turned tables. AMD has announced 2 new CPUs with very high clocks:

• FX-9590: Eight "Piledriver" cores, 5GHz Max Turbo

• FX-9370: Eight "Piledriver" cores, 4.7GHz Max Turbo

As these are turbo clocks for less threaded workloads, the base clock for fully utilized cores is likely to be at least 200MHz lower. Looks like AMD tried to get some more performance right after the Intel Haswell release, as AMD's new architecture will appear only toward the end of the year. AMD says that these CPUs "will be available from system integrators globally beginning this summer."

No information on price, retail availability and most importantly – power consumption. While Piledriver has some improvements over Bulldozer, it is still manufactured on 32 nm process (compared to Intel's 22 nm) and is more power hungry than comparable Intel CPUs. FX-8350 with 4.0GHz base clock and 4.2GHz Turbo has 125 W TDP, while Intel's i5-4670 has 84 W TDP. Such major overclock can help FX-9590 gain an edge over i7-4770 in many tasks, but the price may be too hot. Current rumours put AMD's new behemoth at 220 W, which is extreme power consumption for CPU, requiring massive cooling. We will post an update when more information becomes available.

Update: AMD has told TechReport the base clocks for these two CPUs. Base clocks are 4.7GHz for FX-9590 and 4.4GHz for FX-9370. The rumoured TDP of 220W has also been confirmed, which means that a very powerful cooling solution will be required to run these CPUs. Currently there are no plans for separate retail release of these CPUs, they will only be available in pre-built PCs.