One of AMD's upcoming hexa-core Zen 4 chips (purported Ryzen 5 7600X) has just outperformed Intel's current flagship Core i9-12900K in single-core performance in a new benchmark. Nonetheless, we should treat the leaked benchmark with caution because it's UserBenchmark, and secondly, because the AMD chip is an engineering sample.
The unreleased AMD processor (via Tum_Apisak) surfaced with the 100-000000593-20_Y identifier. According to the benchmark report, it has six cores and 12 threads, so it should be the Ryzen 5 7600X, assuming that AMD retains the exact core count for its Zen 4-powered Ryzen 5 SKUs. Although it's an engineering sample, the Ryzen 5 7600X chip showed impressive clock speeds. The hexa-core part reportedly ran with a 4.4 GHz base clock and 4.95 GHz boost clock. It's plausible that the processor still has some gas in the tank as AMD has boasted that the upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors will arrive with boost clocks over 5 GHz.
The testbed for the Ryzen 5 7600X consisted of the ASRock N7-B65XT motherboard and 32GB (2x16GB) of G.Skill's Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-5600 (F5-5600U3636C16G 2x16GB) memory. The slow DDR5 memory could hold the Ryzen 5 7600X back a little.
The Ryzen 5 7600X delivered up to 22% higher single-core performance than the Core i9-12900K. Compared with the Core i5-12600K, the unannounced Ryzen 5 7600X outpaced the Intel chip by 27%. Furthermore, if we look at a generation-over-generation comparison, the Ryzen 5 7600X posted 56% higher single-core performance than the Ryzen 5 5600X.
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X Benchmarks
| Processor | Single-Core | Multi-Core |
|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 5 7600X | 243 | 1,478 |
| Core i9-12900K | 200 | 2,946 |
| Core i5-12600K | 191 | 1,884 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 156 | 1,198 |
The Ryzen 5 7600X was a stud in single-core performance; however, it likely won't keep up with the Core i9-12900K because of the core count disparity. For reference, the Core i9-12900K is a 16-core Alder Lake processor with eight Performance (P) cores and eight Efficient (E) cores. The Core i9-12900K decimated the Ryzen 5 7600X by 99% in the multi-core department, which wasn't surprising.
The early Ryzen 5 7600X sample looks a bit lacking in multi-core performance. According to UserBenchmark, the Core i5-12600K produced 27% higher multi-core performance than the Ryzen 5 7600X. However, the Ryzen 5 7600X beat the Ryzen 5 5600X by up to 23%.
AMD will likely launch Zen 4 processors this Fall 2022. On the other end, Intel may launch its 13th Generation Raptor Lake chips around that time. It's an exciting time for processors since we'll have two new architectures that'll disrupt the market before the end of the year.
