Intel 10nm SunnyCove CPU Faster than AMD 7nm Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 Processors in CPUZ Benchmark

Intel has been touting its upcoming 10nm Ice Lake architecture as the biggest upgrade in performance since 2015’s Skylake, promising IPC gains of up to 40% in some workloads. The average IPC boost is still a very average 18% (over 6th Gen, not 8th or 9th), most of it coming from the more efficient 10nm node and the new Sunny Cove core architecture. AMD claims its new Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 processors boast a similar IPC gain of 15%, but this advantage is with regard to the Zen+ processors, not a five-year-old product stack.

Ice Lake, Sunny Cove, Comet lake and Matisse

A member of the Chinese Baidu forums has shared what he claims is the single-core performance chart of Intel’s 10th Gen lineup, both Comet Lake as well as Ice Lake, put head to head against AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 3000 “Matisse” processors.

The benchmarks paint Intel’s upcoming 10th Gen lineup in a rather positive light, with the 10nm based Ice Lake (based on the new Sunny Cove Cores) beating pretty much every consumer CPU, from the Core i9-9900KS to AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X, all the while being clocked significantly lower at 3.6-3.7GHz.

An engineering sample of an unannounced 10nm based SunnyCove CPU can be seen with six cores and twelve threads. This part is running at 3.6GHz and easily beats the Ryzen 7 3700X (which by the way is clocked at 4.6GHz). This appears to be a future Ice Lake–based desktop, so team blue has something for enthusiasts and gamers after all in 2020.

There’s also a quad–core mobile Ice Lake chip running at 3.7GHz which quite comfortably trumps AMD’s entire Ryzen 3000 lineup. This is just one benchmark and a single-core test at that but still tells you that Intel still has a few tricks up its sleeve. There’s an octa-core Comet Lake chip as well clocked at 5.2GHz, but it’s slower than the similarly clocked i7-9700K which also has the same core/thread configuration.

Conclusion

A few clear-cut conclusions can be drawn from this benchmark. Firstly, Intel’s 10nm parts are indeed quite promising and should help the company fend off AMD’s Ryzen 3000 lineup, at least to some extent. Furthermore, it appears that team blue will be holding on to the IPC crown if only for a little bit longer. Another noteworthy tidbit you can draw from here is that all the 10nm parts are clocked significantly below Intel’s existing 14nm chips, meaning that the rumors about poor yields and lower clock speeds aren’t false after all. Lastly, you’ve got Comet Lake, another 14nm design stuffed into Intel’s 10th Gen product lineup, and from the looks of it, it will be nowhere as fast as Ice Lake, continuing Intel’s incremental performance jump across generations.

Further Reading:

$399 AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Faster than $484 Intel Core i9-9900K in Geekbench

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