A fresh benchmark (via Tum_Apisak) of AMD's Ryzen 9 5900HX (Cezanne) mobile APU has turned up on Geekbench 5. The rumored Zen 3 part appears even to give Intel's desktop processors a run for their money.
If you haven't been following the Cezanne rumor mill, the Ryzen 9 5900HX is likely the new flagship for AMD's next-generation APUs for mobile devices. Although we haven't completely uncovered the mystery behind the "HX" designation, the consensus is that we're dealing with a SKU that probably allows for overclocking or comes with a more generous thermal limit.
At eight cores and 16 threads, the Ryzen 9 5900HX shares the same configuration as the Ryzen 9 4900H, the current flagship. However, the Ryzen 9 5900X is expected to wield AMD's latest Zen 3 cores, which have proven to possess a tremendous uplift in instructions per cycle (IPC). Additionally, the Ryzen 9 5900X also comes with 16MB of L3 cache, twice as much as the Ryzen 9 4900H.
The previous Ryzen 9 5900X sample arrived with a 3.3 GHz base clock and a 4.6 GHz boost clock. Today's chip has the same base clock but a slightly improved boost clock at 4.71 GHz, according to Geekbench 5. This obviously blows the previous result out of the water.
AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX Benchmarks
| Processor | Single-Core Score | Multi-Core Score |
|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 5900HX | 1,524 | 9,015 |
| Core i9-10900K* | 1,405 | 10,986 |
| Core i9-10980HK | 1,374 | 8,444 |
| Core i7-10700K | 1,350 | 8,982 |
| Ryzen 9 4900H | 1,232 | 8,820 |
*Geekbench 5 average scores.
Before going down the rabbit hole, it's important to highlight a few points. The Ryzen 9 5900X score is only a single submission so take the results with a pinch of salt. Unfortunately, the Ryzen 9 4900H and Core i9-10980HK aren't in Geekbench 5's database of average scores. Therefore, we randomly picked one of the higher results.
The Core i9-10900K and Core i7-10700K scores, on the other hand, reflect the average performance of the respective processors from user submissions on Geekbench 5.
Starting with the most obvious comparison, the Ryzen 9 5900HX delivers up to 23.7% higher single-core performance than the Ryzen 9 4900H. The multi-core performance, on the other hand, didn't impress as much since the Ryzen 9 5900HX was only 2.2% faster.
The Ryzen 9 5900HX had a very strong showing against the Core i9-10980HK as well, which is Intel's fastest Comet Lake-H chip. The results showed the Ryzen 9 5900HX rising above the Core i9-10980HK by 10.9% in single-core performance and 6.8% in multi-core performance.
On a different note, AMD's Zen 3-powered mobile chip puts up a good fight with a couple of Comet Lake-S processors too. If the results are accurate, the Ryzen 9 5900X delivered up to 12.9% higher single-core performance than the Core i7-10700K and matched the octa-core part in multi-core performance. In fact, the Ryzen 9 5900H surpassed the Core i9-10900K in single-core performance by up to 8.5%. This is pretty outstanding, considering that the Core i7-10700K and Core i9-10900K are desktop processors rated for 125W each.
Recent rumors claim that the Ryzen 5000 family may debut early next year. AMD's President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, is scheduled to deliver the virtual CES 2021 keynote on January 12, 2021, and we wouldn't be surprised if Su drops the bomb at the same venue.
