Alder Lake Celeron Matches i9-10900K in Single-Core Benchmark

Intel's Celeron and Pentium chips don't always get the love they deserve. However, the Alder Lake Celeron SKUs, specifically the Celeron G6900, could pack a serious punch if the latest Geekbench 5 results (via Benchleaks) are accurate.

The Celeron G6900, which has a $42 MSRP, rocks two Golden Cove cores and lacks Hyper-Threading. In addition, the dual-core processor doesn't even have access to Intel's boost technologies and sticks to a 3.5 GHz base clock. In order words, the Celeron G6900 is at the bottom of the Alder Lake barrel, but the chip does carry Intel's latest Golden Cove cores, so you shouldn't underestimate it.

According to the Geekbench 5 submissions, the Celeron G6900 resided on an ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard paired with 16GB of DDR4 memory. Using an ASRock motherboard has its perks, such as access to the company's Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology that increases the processor's power limit to enable base clock overclocking. The result varies from processor to processor, but the Celeron G6900 benefitted from a 1 GHz increase, allowing it to run at 4.4 GHz during the benchmarks.

The Celeron G6900 scored 1,391 points and 1,408 points on the single-core tests. For comparison, the Core i9-10900K (Comet Lake) averages 1,393 issues in the same test. Therefore, plebeian Celeron G6900 is on the same level as a Core i9-10900K for single-core performance. We're looking at a Golden Cove core at 4.4 GHz matching the performance of a 5.3 GHz Skylake-derived Comet Lake core. Logically, the latter wipes the floor with the Celeron G6900, given its much higher core count.

Compared to AMD chips, the Celeron G6900 was only 5% slower than AMD's Ryzen 5 5600G (Zen 3 at 4.4 GHz) APU in single-core performance, according to Geekbench 5's average processor scores. However, the Celeron G6900 was slightly faster than the tuned-up Ryzen 7 3800XT (Zen 2 at 4.7 GHz).

The Celeron G6900 is part of Intel's recently announced non-K Alder Lake SKUs that address the needs of budget consumers. When in stock, the dual-core Alder Lake chip retails for $59.99.