AMD's Ryzen 5000 launch isn't far off, and hardware detective @Tum_Apisak has dug up some preliminary benchmarks for the Ryzen 9 5950X. Given the timing of the benchmark submissions the chips should be retail samples, but you should still approach the results with caution.
Being the flagship of the Zen 3 family, the Ryzen 9 5950X is nothing short of impressive. The 7nm chip features a 16-core, 32-thread configuration with 64MB of L3 cache, a 3.4 GHz base clock and boost up to 4.9 GHz. At first glance, the Ryzen 9 5950X doesn't look too different when compared to the current Ryzen 9 3950X. When you really look at it, the Ryzen 9 5950X actually has a 100 MHz lower base clock, but makes up for it with a 200 MHz higher boost clock. However, the real refinement lies with the new Zen 3 microarchitecture. AMD hasn't spilled all the beans on Zen 3 yet, but you can expect more details around review time.
The Ryzen 9 5950X put up a respectable Processor Arithmetic score of 611.94 GOPS. The aggregated score for a Ryzen 9 3950X is 562.11 GOPS. The Ryzen 9 5950X is approximately 8.9% faster in this particular benchmark. When it comes to the Processor Multi-Media test, the Ryzen 9 5950X scored 2066.49 Mpix/s. The Ryzen 9 3950X averages 1650.49 Mpix/s in the same benchmark so we're looking at a remarkable 25.2% difference in the Ryzen 9 5950X's favor.
So, how does the Ryzen 9 5950X stack against its Intel rivals? The Core i9-10900K has aggregated Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media score of 400.99 GOPS and 1142.70 Mpix/s, respectively. The Ryzen 9 5950X is up to 52.6% and 80.8% faster, which isn't a complete shock since AMD's chip does have six more cores.
The Ryzen 9 5950X benchmarks don't just stop with the SiSoftware Sandra software either. The unreleased 16-core chip also did a few rounds in Geekbench 5.
The Geekbench 5 submissions are a bit tricky to decipher. It's plausible that some extreme overclocking is playing with the Ryzen 9 5950X under liquid nitrogen, which would explain the 6 GHz clock speeds. In order to hide the submissions from prying eyes, the overclock could have masked them as a Hackintosh machine. The other possibility is that it's simply an error on Geekbench 5's part to properly detect the clock speeds for the Ryzen 9 5950X.
At any rate, the resourceful tipster found a similar Ryzen 9 3900X submission to shed some light on the situation. The Ryzen 9 3900X operated at 5.89 GHz and the Ryzen 9 5950X, which is an engineering sample, at 6.02 GHz. The clock speeds aren't exactly identical, but they should give us a fair idea of the level of performance uplift, nonetheless.
The Ryzen 9 5950X had a single-core score of 2,022 points, while the Ryzen 9 3900X raked in 1,696 points. That's a whopping 19.2% improvement. According to the results, the Ryzen 9 5950X delivered 12.9% higher multi-core performance than the Ryzen 9 3900X.
Ryzen 5000 will hit the retail shelves on November 5. Don't forget to check back for our review so you're not left wondering if Zen 3 pans out to what it appears to be.
