Intel’s Rocket Lake i9 surpasses AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series in new benchmarks

Intel's Rocket Lake i9 surpasses AMD's Ryzen 5000 series in new benchmarks

Intel’s Rocket Lake i9 surpasses AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series in new benchmarks

With the launch of their Ryzen 5000 series, AMD moved from being an underdog to becoming the x86 CPU market leader, offering more cores and higher levels of single-threaded performance than Intel in many market segments. Intel was placed on the back foot, and drastic changes were needed to bring Intel’s CPU lineup back into contention. 

Enter Rocket Lake, a new core architecture from Intel which delivers to consumers a new core architecture, Xe-powered integrated graphics and support for advanced features like AVX-512 and DL-boost. Early benchmarks are also showcasing Rocket Lake in a positive light, with Passmark results showcasing single-threaded performance leadership over AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series. When compared to Intel’s i9-10900K, Intel’s new i9-11900K appears to offer users an 18.5% single-threaded performance advantage in PassMark.

On Passmark’s CPU database, Intel’s i9-11900K delivers an overall CPU score of 28,082 and a single-threaded CPU score of 3,764. If this CPU score is legitimate, Intel has regained single-threaded performance leadership within PassMark, outperforming AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X, which has a single-threaded score of 3,511.  That said, this Intel result is based on a single processor, which means that this result could be inaccurate. 

Intel’s i7-11700K, a lower-performance 11th gen 8-core Rocket Lake processor, has already been listed with a single-threaded score of 3,548, signalling that the i9-11900K offers users a 6% single-threaded performance boost. Assuming that both processors have clock speeds that boost to around 5GHz, this score difference implies that the i9-11900K has a single-core boost clock speed that is 250-300MHz higher than the i7-11700K. This performance gap is in-line with current expectations based on leaked Rocket Lake CPU specifications. 

While Intel’s single-threaded benchmarks are impressive, it is worth noting that AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X processor is listed with an overall CPU score of 28,681 on PassMark, giving AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series CPUs a performance advantage in multi-threaded workloads. If nothing else, this shows that AMD and Intel different strengths and weaknesses, and that Intel’s Rocket Lake processors will not necessarily be better than AMD’s equivalent 8-core in all workloads. 

Intel's Rocket Lake i9 surpasses AMD's Ryzen 5000 series in new benchmarks  
Even if Intel’s Rocket Lake series of processors can deliver higher levels of single-threaded performance in some workloads, it is hard to deny that this alone will not give Intel a clear cut victory over AMD. Intel’s Rocket Lake results are not ahead of AMD by a huge margin, and AMD can offer PC builders up to two times as many cores on their mainstream AM4 socket. Beyond that, there will be workloads that will prefer AMD’s Zen 3 core architecture, which means that Intel’s single-threaded leadership in PassMark may not result in leadership performance elsewhere. 

With Rocket Lake, Intel’s single-threaded performance leadership is slim in Passmark. That said, Intel plans to release a Rocket Lake successor in the second half of 2021, promising buyers another new CPU architecture, which could extent Intel’s performance lead further. That said, AMD is currently working on Zen 4, which means that AMD will soon have its own opportunity to leapfrog Intel once again. 

It’s an exciting time for the CPU market, with both Intel and AMD delivering major generational improvements in single-threaded performance. These improvements will allow for games to run at higher framerates, programs to feel more responsive, and rendering/compilation tasks to take up less of our valuable time. All of these things are good for consumers, assuming that product supply and CPU pricing can be kept in check. 

Intel's Rocket Lake i9 surpasses AMD's Ryzen 5000 series in new benchmarks  
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