AMD’s Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” Cores Just Over 10% Faster than Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake “Golden Cove” Cores at Stock [GB5]

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors are all set to launch in the coming weeks. Featuring the Zen 4 core architecture, TSMC’s 5nm process node, and the brand new AM5 platform, we’ve been promised some serious performance upgrades. Team Red has claimed a single-core uplift of over 15% and multi-threaded gains of up to 57%. We’ve seen multiple benchmarks of various Zen 4 chips, primarily from Geekbench 5, SiSoft Sandra, and Cinebench R23. Today, we’ve got another such test of a Ryzen 9 7950X running at its peak boost clock of 5.85GHz.

We get a single-core score of 2,213 points and a multi-core score of 22,443 points. Compared to its Alder Lake rival, the Core i9-12900K this is a modest gain of 10% in the former and roughly 20% in the latter. These aren’t very encouraging figures, especially in the multi-threaded department. Raptor Lake is set to double the E-core count to 16 (24 overall) which means that Intel’s 13th Gen offerings will be quite a bit faster in heavily threaded workloads while leveling with their Ryzen 7000 counterparts in lightly threaded applications.

Taking a closer look at the performance figures clears things up a little. The Gracemont cores on the i9-12900K heavily benefit cryptography, making it the best chip in the department, and a good 40-50% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X. In the integer and floating point benchmarks, the latter has a satisfactory lead of 20-25% over its hybrid competitor. Interestingly, the Zen 4 flagship is equally faster than the Intel top-chip in both integer and floating point benchmarks. Usually, it leads in the former while offering roughly the same levels of performance in the latter.