When AMD announced its Matisse flagship, the Ryzen 9 3950X, it became the fastest processor beating Intel’s 36 thread Core i9-9980XE, but on the single core side, the i9-9900K continued to reign supreme. Now, chip detective, TUM_APISAK has shared the Geekbench score of yet another 16 Core/32 Thread Matisse (Ryzen 3000) possibly an engineering sample (correction) which beats all the i9s, both in the single-core as well as the multi-core test. Behold:
The single-core score is quite a bit higher than the earlier benchmark while the multi-core performance has also seen a healthy boost.
There is one core difference, the older chip was running on an X470 board while this is leveraging the newer, far superior X570 chipset. This means that in addition to faster memory and PCIe 4 support, the new platform might also be ideal for enthusiasts who like pushing their chips to the max.
Now let’s compare this Ryzen 9 3950X look-alike to the Core i9-9900K (highest single-core score) and the 18-core i9-9980XE (fastest multi-threaded score). The Coffee lake based i9 yields 6,213 points in the single-core test and 34,066 in the multi-core benchmark, while the 9980XE scores slightly lower (5,377 points) in the SC and a rather significant 46,175 points in the multi-core test. However, when you look at the (lookalike) Ryzen 3950X, it nets 6,714 and 64,953 points in the single and multi-threaded tests, respectively, effectively beating the Intel chips in both the benchmarks, by a noteworthy margin.
Related: AMD: EPYC Rome will Double our Server CPU Share, Intel on the Run
It may seem surprising seeing a 16-core part beat an 18-core CPU, but it’s not all that unexpected. The Core i9-9980XE is based on the 14nm Skylake architecture (which is five years old) and has rather timid clocks (just 4.4GHz boost). Thanks to the efficiency of the Zen 2 architecture and the 7nm node, the Ryzen 9 3950X can run at much higher frequencies, and coupled with a higher IPC makes short work of the $2000 chip, while costing less than half as much ($749).
The Coffee Lake-based Core i9-9900K was the fastest gaming chip mainly due to its high operating speeds and Intel’s (still reasonable) IPC. However, Zen 2 makes an appreciable improvement in IPC compared to Zen+, and the ability to run at much faster frequencies than its predecessors effectively nullifies its competitor’s advantage, thereby making it the new performance king.
Read more:
Intel Sounds Scared of AMD and its Zen 2 Architecture, Internal Document Reveals
This is poor journalism – as pointed out by another web site 10 hours prior to your note coming out, this is not a 3950X (indicated by the lower base clock speed), it is very likely an engineering sample being tested by AMD, it (very likely) uses exotic cooling to hit 5.2 Ghz on all cores… hence the test results. Nowhere in your article do you indicate all the “unknowns” about the chip, the test conditions, etc… instead you publish it as fact, as it pertains to a stock 3950X. sry, but you should retract this article, or at the very least, ammend it significantly.
“”So, what do the numbers on this mysterious new chip look like?
It’s a 16 core, 32 thread processor with a stock base frequency of 3.3GHz, 200MHz below that of the Ryzen 9 3950X. BUT, and this is crucial, it is running on an all-core overclocked frequency of 5.2 GHz.”” I.e., this is not a 3950X!!! and even if it were (which it aint), it’s OC’d to 5.2 on all cores… I re-read your article… I’m not sure if it was intentional mis-direction, or if just (several) oversights…