AMD Threadripper has been knocked out of the world championship as the Intel Xeon W9-3495X 56-core workstation processor absolutely crushes it in the industry-standard Cinebench R23 benchmark.
If you haven’t used Cinebench R23, it’s a visual rendering benchmark that breaks down an image into individual pieces, each of which is drawn sequentially to the screen. The more processing cores and threads available to draw these fragments, the faster the overall image can be rendered and the higher the processor score.
For the longest time, AMD’s Threadripper series of workstation chips have held the top spot thanks to their ample processing core counts, with the Threadripper 3995X and 5995X both featuring 64 cores and 128 threads. This usually gives Threadripper chips a substantial advantage over Intel’s competing Xeon chips, which surprised us with these results, since the Intel Xeon W9-3495X has 8 fewer cores and 16 threads.
Still, despite the lower core and thread count, the W9-3495X managed a score of 132,484 in Cinebench R23 for multi-core performance. That’s more than 10,000 points higher than the previous world record holder, the AMD Threadripper 5995WX, which scored 121,215.
While this is a huge win for Intel, and certainly brings some bragging rights, those may be short-lived.as world technology (opens in a new tab) Note that AMD’s Zen 4 Threadripper chips are on the way, and the 64-core/128-thread Threadripper 7995WX will likely reclaim the crown before the end of the year.
That’s great for Intel, but why should I care?
Cinebench R23’s new world record is certainly impressive, but it’s also an incredibly niche record for most people, and one that’s also hard to recreate.
Intel’s and AMD’s records were both set using chips cooled by special liquid nitrogen units – even if you have an Intel Xeon W9-3495X, it’s unlikely to get your hands on it, not since the Xeon and Threadripper chip families It’s a high-end workstation kit worth thousands of dollars.
What’s more, these records were achieved by overclocking the processor for faster frequencies, in this case about 184 percent faster than the standard clock frequency at which the Xeon chip was designed to run.
Still, it’s important to the average consumer. Intel Xeon’s instruction-per-clock (IPC) improvements have allowed it to break world records and are not limited to Intel’s Xeon family. We can expect them to make their way to manufacturers’ consumer-market chips in the coming years, just as the improvements AMD has made to its Zen 4 Threadrippers will benefit its entire processor lineup.
So Intel and AMD can push their best processors even further, and even if they’re for workstation PCs, anyone looking for the best gaming PCs to the best Chromebooks will benefit from the engineering behind this world-record feat.
