A screenshot of popular benchmarking tool Geekbench revealed by regular Twitter leaker APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) supposedly shows AMD's new 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X beating Intel's current desktop flagship – the Core i9-9980XE. The latter has 18 cores and costs $2000 while AMD’s new king of the hill costs just $749 and has two fewer cores.
The benchmark result has resulted in a huge furor online, with many disputing the results while others saying Intel is finished, given the price difference between the two CPUs. Two scores were revealed – a single-core score and a multi-core score. The former was also faster than the Intel CPU, but that was to be expected since the Ryzen 9 3950X has a boost frequency of 4.7GHz while the Core i9-9980XE can only reach 4.4GHz. Most other mainstream CPUs also beat the 9980XE here due to its lower boost frequency. With the latest CPUs from both companies sitting roughly even in IPC performance now according to the latest AMD benchmarks, that would understandably give AMD a lead.
The multi-core result is somewhat harder to believe and here’s why. At the moment, we have no idea what kind of all-core boost frequencies the Ryzen 9 3950X has – all we know is that they will be determined to some extent by your own system’s power and cooling capabilities and will lay somewhere between the 3.5GHz base frequency and 4.7GHz boost frequency. At AMD’s Tech Day held in Los Angeles recently, the company overclocked a Ryzen 9 3950X to over 5GHz using liquid nitrogen (air or water-cooled overclocks will likely be a lot lower than this), where it was understandably extremely fast, posting a Cinebench R15 score of 5,434. However, the Core i9-9980Xe can manage 3,700 points at stock speed, making the AMD CPU 47% faster, but only when overclocked in this extreme way.
The Geekbench multi-core scores put the AMD result a similar 42% ahead and that to me suggests that this result is also based on a massively overclocked CPU and not one at stock speed, which everyone is assuming. In fact, since difference benchmarks respond differently, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Geekbench results are from a similar system using extreme cooling and not a typical air or liquid-cooled system.
As usual, these results should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt, but an especially large dose in this case as the numbers just don’t seem to add up. I’ll be reporting on the latest news regarding AMD’s new 3rd Gen Zen 2 Ryzen CPUs and will have my own reviews in early July. Till then, make sure you don’t miss my full coverage of AMD’s announcements from E3 on what’s new with 3rd Gen Ryzen including the best memory, an exclusive look at the Ryzen 9 3950X and the lowdown on AMD’s Navi GPUs.
