52-core Xeon 8470 Demolishes Threadripper 3990X in New Benchmarks

New benchmark results for Intel’s upcoming 52-core Sapphire Rapids Xeon Platinum 8470 have surfaced online, showing impressive performance from Intel's new Sapphire Rapids architecture. As shared by Twitter leaker @yuuki_ans, the new Xeon was able to outperform AMD’s 64 Core Threadripper 3990X in a multitude of benchmarks including Cinebench R15, R20, R23, CPU-Z, and V-Ray.

As usual, note that these results are not official, so take them with a grain of salt. Sapphire Rapids is still in development, so performance is subject to change before release.

Sapphire Rapids is Intel’s upcoming server microarchitecture that will be the successor to Intel's current lineup of Ice Lake Xeon processors. It will be Intel's first server architecture to use the company's new 10nm SuperFin process – or Intel 7 as it calls it now, which should give Sapphire Rapids a significant boost in performance. 

For all intents and purposes, Sapphire Rapids is the server version of Alder Lake, powered by the same performance cores known as Golden Cove. However, unlike Alder Lake, Sapphire Rapids will not rely on Gracemount efficiency cores.

The Sapphire Rapids SKU used in the benchmarks is the Xeon Platinum 8470, with 52 Cores and 104 threads. We can confirm if this is the flagship SKU, but there’s a chance it could be or it could be the second in line. According to CPU-Z, the CPU appears to have a peak turbo clock of 3.8 GHz.

In Cinebench R20, we saw the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X achieve a very respectable 25,082 points in our testing. But Intel's Sapphire Rapids chip managed to outperform the 3990X by 17%, with a score of 29,344 points -- despite the Xeon having an inferior core count.

Unfortunately, we didn't do any testing of the 3990X in Cinebench R15, R23 or CPU-Z, and our V-Ray scores use a different version of the app. So for these benchmarks, we'll have to divulge to 3rd party reviews and testing.

For Cinebench R23, we got our 3990X results from CPU-Monkey. According to them, the Threadripper 3990X scored 74,422 points. But the Xeon 8470 comes swinging back with a score of 79,150 points -- a 6.3% lead over the 3990X.

However, in Cinebench R15 it appears the 3990X finally gets its first win (and only win) over the Xeon 8470. According to Guru3D and Overclock3D, both outlets report a Cinebench R15 score of 10,055 - 10,088 points, which outperforms the 8470’s score of 8949 points by around 12%.

But the tide changes quickly when we check out the CPU-Z benchmark results. With CPU-Z, the 52-core Xeon achieves its most prominent win over the 3990X with a whopping 70.7% performance improvement over the 64 Core AMD chip. The CPU-Z score came out to a solid 55,000 points for the Xeon 8470, while the 3990X only managed a score of 32,215.

The final benchmark shared was a V-Ray score, and according to results from Hexus, the Xeon chip wins again. According to Hexus, its 3990X test results in V-ray came out with a score of 74,449 points. When compared to the Sapphire Rapids chip, it comes out on top with 76,710 points -- a 3% lead.

Unfortunately, we don't have any official benchmark results of AMD's new Threadripper 5000WX Pro CPUs and AMD's server CPUs such as Milan and Milan-X to compare against. However, if AMD's 3990X results tell us anything, it's that Sapphire Rapids can offer incredible performance over AMD's Zen 2 counterparts, which should provide some good competition against Zen 3 Threadripper and EPYC processors.

Correction: This story originally listed the wrong number of Xeon Platinum 8470 cores. We regret the error.