Which are yet more channels which fall into the bucket of less "competent" "tech" YouTube channels. I would advice to avoid such channels unless you do it for amusement or looking for sources of false rumors. These channels serve one of two purposes; serve people the "news" they want to hear (in the echo chambers), or to shape public opinion. If you listen to more than a few episodes you'll see all of these are all over the place, are inconsistent with themselves, and fail to master any deeper technical knowledge. Some of these provide their own "leaks", while others just recite pretty much everything they can scrape of the web.
Speculation is of course fine, and many of us enjoy discussing potential hardware, myself included, but speculation should be labeled as such, not be labeled as "leaks" when it's not. Whenever we see leaks we should always check if it passes some basic "smell tests";
- Who is the source and does it have a good track record? Always see where the leak originates; if it's from WCCFTech, VideoCardz, FudZilla or somewhere random, then it's fairly certainly fake, random twitter/forum posts often is fake, but can occasionally be true, etc. "Leaks" from official drivers, compilers, official papers etc. are pretty solid. Some sources are also know to have a certain bias, even though they can have elements of truth to their claims.
- Is the nature of the "leak" something which can be known, or is likely to be known outside a few core engineers? Example: Clock speeds are never set in stone until they have the final stepping shortly ahead of a release, so when someone posts a table of clock speeds of CPUs/GPUs 6-12 monts ahead, you can know it's BS.
- Is the specificity of the leak something that is sensitive? If the details is only known to a few people under NDA, then those leaking it will risk losing their job and potential lawsuits, how many are willing to do that to serve a random YouTube channel or webpage? What is their motivation?
- Is the scope of the leak(s) likely at all? Some of these channels claims to have dozens of sources inside Intel/AMD/Nvidia, seriously a random guy in his basement have such good sources? Some of these claims to even have single sources who provides sensitive NDA'ed information from both Intel and AMD about products 1+ years away, there is virtually no chance this claim is true, and is an immediate red flag to me.
Unfortunately, most "leaks" are either qualified guesses or pure BS, sometimes an accumulation of both (either intentionally or not). Perhaps sometime you should look back after a product release and evaluate the accuracy and the timeline of the leaks. The general trend is usually that early leaks are usually only true about "big" features, early "specific"(clocks, TDP, shader count(GPUs)) leaks are usually fake. Then usually there is a spike in leaks around the time the first engineering samples arrives, various leaked benchmarks, etc. but clocks are still all over the place. Then there is another spike when board partners get their hands on it, then the accuracy increases a lot, but there is still some variance. Then usually a few weeks ahead of release, we get pretty much precise details.
Edit:
Rumors about Polaris, Vega, Vega 2x and Navi 1x have pretty much started out the same way; very unrealistic initially, and then pessimistic close to the actual release. Let's hope Navi 2x delivers, but please don't drive the hype too high.
