Geekbench: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Crushes Intel’s $2,000 Core i9-9980XE

Tsing

The FPS Review
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Intel’s 18-core, 36-thread Core i9-9980XE appears to be no match for AMD’s 16-core, 32-thread flagship Ryzen CPU.

The Ryzen 9 3950X managed a single-core score of 5868 and multi-core score of 61072 in a leaked Geekbench test result. That’s significantly higher than the Core i9-9980XE’s single-core score of 5395 and multi-core score of 46618.

This is rather amusing, being that Intel’s part costs $2,000 and AMD’s costs $750.

Granted, we don’t know the full story here and under which conditions the AMD CPU was tested. Geekbench shows the chip as having a 3.3 GHz base clock speed and a 4.3 GHz turbo clock speed, which may point to this chip being an engineering sample. That means that the Ryzen 9 3950X could show even better performance in the fall, as AMD advertised a 3.5-GHz base clock speed and a 4.7-GHz boosted clock speed for the chip.
 
Interesting, but your right. We really do not know the full story here. Were the various mitigation patches applied on the Intel side? What were the respective memory configurations of each system? Cooling also comes into play given that the Intel Core i9 9980XE has a base clock of 3.0GHz (lower than AMD) and a higher turbo frequency of (4.4GHz) compared to the 4.3GHz listed for this particular Ryzen 3950X. Then again, AMD has a clock speed advantage all around, and that IPC game has certainly closed somewhat if not entirely. It could be that Geekbench is reading the Ryzen clocks incorrectly and we are seeing is primarily due to AMD's clock speed advantage. That would certainly allow the numbers to make sense.

For the single core test, it would make sense given AMD has a substantial clock speed advantage. On the multi-core test, there is still a clock speed advantage in AMD's favor but the Ryzen 3950X has two less cores than the i9 9980XE. The latter also has a memory bandwidth advantage, but we don't know what the RAM clocks are or their timings. Another possibility is that Geekbench is an outlier and something about it favors AMD's CPU's more than Intel's accounting for a wider discrepancy than we'd imagine.

I can't wait to get one on the bench. That's all I know for sure.
 
3950x - Single Core - 5868

i did a double take at that 61,072 as the single core score lol.
 
Sorry about that; I've updated the post with the correct single-core score.
 
As a point of reference:

My 7700k (4c/8t) = 6181 / 21458 (4.9Ghz OC)
My 9880H (8c/16t) = 5551 / 27221 ('19 MBP)
 
Should be interesting when people start getting these in hand.
 
So juicy...if this rings true, I can't wait to see what Intel's response will be.

Last two times there was a performance flip the inferior products' prices dropped off a cliff.
 
A weeb can hope. Never trust any numbers until the retail release.
 
_k_ said:
A weeb can hope. Never trust any numbers until the retail release.
Click to expand...

Without a doubt. Intel and AMD have both made many claims over the years that were never true or were only accurate under specific circumstances that were so rare as to be inconsequential. That said, AMD has been far more accurate since Ryzen's release. Whether or not this trend holds true for Zen 2 is still up in the air. We'll see.
 
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