AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Squares Off With Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake In Benchmark Leak
by
Zak Killian
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Tuesday, August 30, 2022, 05:02 PM EDT
Ah, Geekbench. While the benchmark app is occasionally controversial—particularly where comparisons against Apple hardware are involved—it makes for a reasonably solid benchmark with consistent and relevant results, within the same platform. AMD just announced its new line-up of Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and the Ryzen 9 7950X last night, and now we've got a leaked Geekbench result for the 16-core processor.
Unfortunately, those results have already been hidden in the database, but the Geekbench admins weren't fast enough to outrun the tearless electric eye of @BenchLeaks on Twitter. Benchleaks highlighted the result around noon today, and given this chip's sky-high boost clock of 5759 MHz, we suspect that this is surely final silicon.
Just after the result was posted to the Geekbench database, Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537 on Twitter) managed to compare it against another result from a leaked processor: Intel's Core i9-13900K. Both results were captured using high-end ASUS ROG motherboards, which might be a possible indicator where the leak originated.
These results are extremely close. The Ryzen 9 7950X outpaces the Core i9-13900K chip in single-threaded and multi-threaded, but only by 2.2% on a single thread and just 0.9% across all threads, which could simply be margin-of-error. That's extremely exciting stuff to see, but it's probably not quite accurate, as we suspect that this Raptor Lake processor may be an engineering sample of some sort.
What we can see of the benchmark result doesn't include boost clock rates, but the single-core score is barely better than the score we saw last week for a non-K Core i9-13900 chip. There are a lot of possibilities here: this could be the real performance of a 13900K with power limits enabled, it could be thermally-limited, or it could be a benchmark using a piece of pre-final silicon. It's worth nothing that the results here are slightly higher than we saw back in July.
It's unfortunately impossible to know, but the prospect of AMD and Intel's flagships being neck-and-neck like this is exciting. We'll know for sure—and then you will, too—when we confirm with our own testing, as soon as we have Raptor Lake and AMD's Ryzen 7000 Series in hand.