AMD has taken the CPU world by storm thanks to its brilliant third-gen Ryzen processors. The Zen 2 based CPUs have managed to surpass expectations by trading punches with Intel and actually winning some fights. This is the first time in almost a decade that AMD processors are showing stronger results than Intel processors on outright performance.
The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, likewise, came out with a bang after initial reports touted it as the best sub-$500 CPU out there, beating the similarly priced flagship Intel Core i9-9900K in the process. That particular competition was always stacked against the Intel processor though with its lesser 8 cores as compared to AMD’s 12 core powerhouse.
However, an overclocker has just pitted the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X against the 12-Core Intel Core i9-9920X in an overclocked battle and the results are actually astonishing.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X overclocked to 5.62 GHz beats an Intel Core i9-9920X at almost 6 GHz
The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X has been out for a while now but no one had really pushed it to the absolute limit, until now. An Australian overclocker, Jordan Hyde, has managed to overclock his Ryzen 9 3900X to an impressively high speed of 5.625 GHz. He did this using LN2 on all of the cores. In order to achieve the frequency, a voltage of 1.800V was used. Other than the processor, the test bench featured a modest 16 GB of 4400 MHz DDR4 RAM.
While Intel processors can usually reach higher clock speeds, AMD’s impressive performance despite lower clock speeds cannot be undermined. Furthermore, the Ryzen 9 3900X is one of the only new 12 core CPUs you can get for under $500.
When tested in the wPrime 1024M, the Ryzen 9 3900X managed to finish in 35.517 seconds. The processor also did very well in the 32M run, finishing the test in 1.797 seconds. Overall, this run is the highest score for a wPrime run on a Ryzen 9 3900X and is also the second highest score for a 12-core processor.
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As compared to the Intel side of things, the Ryzen 9 3900X overclocked at 5.62 GHz managed to beat the Intel Core i9-7920X and Core i9-9920X in multiple tests, both of which were overclocked at 5.95 GHz and 5.92 GHz respectively. However, an Intel Core i9-9920X overclocked at 6.105 GHz by a US overclocker SPLAVE still retains the top spot in the 1024M run with a time of 35.95 seconds.
The story is very different in Cinebench tests though as the Ryzen 9 3900X retains the top spot in both the Cinebench R11.5 and Cinebench R15 for all 12-Core CPUs.
In Cinebench R11.5, a 5.5 GHz Ryzen 9 3900X overclocked by KaRtA managed to get 48.43 points as compared to only 43.02 points scored by a Core i9-7920X overclocked at 5.98 GHz. The trend of lower frequencies but higher scores continues in the Cinebench R15 as well with the Ryzen 9 3900X overclocked at 5.6 GHz scoring 4461 points as compared to the Intel Core i9-9920X managing 4025 points at 5.92 GHz.
Other than Cinebench and wPrime, the Ryzen 9 3900X finished the testing by annihilating the Intel Core i9-9920X in Geekbench 3 as well with 79459 points as compared to Intel’s 73417 points. While most people did have an idea about the performance advantage of the Ryzen 9 3900X, the unleashed potential of the processor was astonishing to say the least.
AMD surprised by lead over Intel
The $500 12-Core CPU from AMD is arguably the best value you’re going to get for your money at this price point. Not only that, AMD has also managed to rule the other price segments of the CPU market as well. The 3rd Gen Ryzen processors continue to amaze everyone with the value they offer.
While Intel still has some advantages over AMD chips, especially in terms of optimization, AMD has really caught Intel napping this generation. Even those at AMD were surprised by how much they have managed to catch up to Intel over the past couple of years. Even AMD’s stocks have been on the up for a while now. Currently sitting at $42.55, the stocks are actually very close to AMD’s all-time high of $47.5, almost 2 decades ago. Here’s what Forrest Norrod, a senior AMD executive had to say about the situation:
“We had some deficits vs Intel in some of the low thread count or single thread count, single threaded applications. With Rome, we not only doubled the throughput or more than doubled the throughput in terms of doubling the cores per socket over our previous generation and more than doubled versus Intel’s contemporary generation.
But we also did a lot of work on IPC so that the architecture of the machines was just faster on a per thread basis, and of course, with the process advantage that we have, where we had originally planned to have process parity with Intel, and we were super excited about that.
First time in the industry, we’re going to break the laws of nature that had governed the semiconductor industry for the last 30 years, which is – it’s like the fourth wall of Physics in semiconductors, Intel has a process node advantage. We were excited 4 years ago, because we thought we’re going to be at parity. We didn’t dream that we would be ahead.
And so, that is also beyond the architectural advantage that we design for, that we plan for, that’s also been a huge uplift.
We’re delivering substantially better performance and better power. And so, there’s sort of no place to hide. Pretty much across the board in terms of the vast majority of workloads, except for maybe a few that have been very tightly tuned for some peculiarity of Intel’s ISA. We think we’re in great leadership position even better than we had originally planned.”
However, despite AMD’s recent wins, the company needs to keep pushing to fully conquer the top spot. While Intel has been trying to respond with its own price cuts, the advantage that AMD has gained with its 7nm chips is just too much for now.
In addition to the CPUs, AMD is not going slow over on the Graphics card side either. The company has been going head to head against NVIDIA with its Navi graphics cards. With hardware raytracing support coming to AMD graphics cards with the new RDNA 2 architecture, the future looks bright for the company. In addition to that, both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X will also be powered by AMD hardware.