AMD quietly annihilated Intel in a hotly contested world record — with 192 water-cooled EPYC cores hidden behind a cardboard protector
There’s a new champion in the race to get the best score in the industry-standard Cinebench R23 test, with the AMD EPYC 9654 processor hitting a world record of 147,668.
This record was achieved by linking two AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs together to achieve a 192-core configuration with 384 threads and overclocking the processors to 3.7 GHz. The score is also about 15,000 points higher than that of the Intel Xeon W903495X 56-core workstation processor, the previous record holder.
This AMD processor belongs to the best CPUs out there, and the result was achieved with two cores operating in parallel with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) disabled, as well as custom liquid cooling so that the cores never reached temperatures above 65 degrees Celsius. They were also protected by cardboard, according to DaveReconRF, who conducted the test. This, the user said, will eventually be replaced by 3D printed shells.
Why AMD steals the crown back matters
Priced at $11,800, the AMD EPYC 9654 has a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz with a maximum boost of 3.7 GHz. It also has a 384MB L3 cache and offers PCIe 5.0 connectivity with 12 memory channels and support for DDR5 RAM.
Cinebench R23, meanwhile, is an important benchmark for visual rendering that divides the image into fragments, each drawn sequentially on the screen. The better the processor, the faster the image can be displayed, which corresponds to a higher score.
AMD Threadripper CPUs have long dominated the benchmark, with the 3995X and 5995X processors in particular achieving record scores in recent years. But the Intel Xeon W9-3495X defeated the AMD Threadripper 5995WX earlier this year, with a score of 132,484 versus 121,215.
However, Intel’s reign as world champion in this particular area has been short-lived, with an AMD processor once again setting a new standard in the Cinebench R23 test. There’s every chance it’s the latest 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX chip for workstations could also make a good claim to score highly in the Cinebench R23 test.