system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When Intel or AMD build a CPU, do they know in advance how high the CPU will be able to clock?

I know they probably have targets but I was wondering if there was some method they use to simulate the physical properties of the CPU before production.
gpt
CPU developers have to find the maximum clock speed at which their architecture will be stable. They should have a pretty good idea of where this stable speed is, since they developed the architecture and roughly know the limitations of the hardware design, but there's a lot of testing to find the true maximum.

If you set the clock speed too high, one instruction may still be processing while the next instruction tries to read its result. This is what makes an incorrectly overclocked computer unstable.

Once the engineers find a stable clock speed, they turn it down to have of a safe space between an unstable clock speed and the speed at which they sell the CPU. That buffer is why you can safely overclock by a certain amount.

Source: university course

Edited for clarity.