AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Zen 5 CPU Makes An Early Benchmark Cameo, Looks Strong
That's because a series of leaks, culminating in a score for the top-end Ryzen 9 9950X, have painted the picture that AMD's Zen 5 processors are going to offer scorching single-threaded performance. There are all kinds of factors that go into Geekbench performance, so there's no need to try and draw any conclusions from a 1% difference in a leaked score, but the results are still exciting nonetheless.
Of those factors, one of the greatest for multi-core performance on both Ryzen processors and Geekbench 6 multi-core scores is actually memory bandwidth. With the sixth version of the popular cross-platform benchmark, the tests were tweaked such that the system's score is strongly affected by main memory bandwidth.
While Zen 5 is expected to bring improvements in memory performance over Zen 4, these chips will slot into the same mainboards with the same memory slots, and we can see in the result listings that they were tested with unexceptional memory configurations. Actually, some of these results don't even hit stock Ryzen 7000 memory speeds, so there's definitely headroom here.
Even with that handicap, Zen 5 looks to handily outstrip Zen 4 in the single-threaded tests, and even give a solid whooping to Intel's 14th-gen Core chips that usually dominate Geekbench ST results. These are undoubtedly impressive results, and it's likely that finely-tuned machines running final firmware will offer up even better performance. We'll know once the chips launch, which is supposed to happen late this month.
