An Intel Core i9-10980HK running at an insane all-core boost of 5.2GHz has finally managed to beat AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800H. Before you get excited (or offended), let’s back up a bit and clear a few things. The Core i9-10980HK will be limited to only a few notebooks and even among them, just a handful of those $3,000 Zephyrus or Omen gaming laptops will be able to hit 5.2GHz. Plus, only in certain applications. Geekbench is nowhere near intensive as Cinebench or Assassins’ Creed, and there’s a very good chance that the CPU will choke in those applications.
However, for the sake of curiosity, we’ll have a look at how the Core i7-10980HK performs at an all-core 5.2GHz boost and compare it to the Ryzen 7 4800H:
The 10th Gen Core i9 manages a hefty 6,321 points in the single-core benchmark, 20% higher than the Ryzen 7 4800H. The surprising part is the higher multi-core score which is considered AMD’s domain. It may not be faster by much (<5%), but it still shows how far Intel has taken its 14nm Skylake architecture. The chip has been overclocked to such a level that it actually manages to close a multi-core performance gap of nearly 15%.
Overclocking, although does help boost the overall performance in multi-threaded applications, it’s mainly helpful in gaming and other frequency-dependent applications.
Still, this is just one benchmark and it’s not clear under what conditions the CPU was tested. We’ll have to wait for third party benchmarks for an exact verdict.
