New AMD Ryzen 9 9900X leaks show a powerful CPU that could worry Intel
Leaked benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X have surfaced, with the upcoming Zen 5 CPU impressively showcasing its single-core and multi-core performance.
As noted by Video cardzThe 12-core Ryzen 9900X processor earned a score of 3,401 in Geekbench 6’s single-core test. For reference, that’s a substantial 10.1% lead over the Intel Core i9-14900K and a big 15.6% jump over the flagship AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
This leak revealed another notable fact: the 9900X reached speeds higher than 5.6 GHz.
The Ryzen 9 9900X’s supposed multi-core performance also proved to be almost as impressive. The CPU managed a score of 19,756 in Geekbench 6 multi-core, once again outpacing AMD’s current flagship but remaining just shy of Intel’s 14900K.
The second leak confirms this, showing the 9900X’s multi-core performance in Cinebench R23 with an aggregate score of 33,000 in 120W TDP mode and 34,500 in 170W mode. Wccftech reports. The high-end Ryzen 9 CPU trails the Intel Core i7-14700K (which has more cores and threads at a higher boost clock) by about 2%, so the margins are small.
If true (and we should obviously be careful not to assume too much), then these benchmarks are an encouraging sign of the strength of the upcoming Ryzen 9000 series, which is rumored to launch globally on July 31 (AMD hasn’t given us an exact date, but has said it will launch in July.)
It’s important to note that the 9900X isn’t the most powerful of the next-gen lineup – that’s a title that belongs to the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. From what we’ve seen, it’s possible that these two chips are among the best processors on the market, but we won’t know until we test them ourselves.
AMD Ryzen 9000 Series Could Be The Best
These first benchmarks show that the Ryzen 9900X is more powerful than we expected. The improvement in single-core and multi-core performance is definitely noticeable here.
That’s clearly something Intel has to think about, but we don’t know how hard Team Blue will push back with its own next-gen CPUs. We could see Intel Arrow Lake as early as September, perhaps, and some rumors in the past have been pretty positive about the gains these processors will make.
Keep in mind that unlike the Ryzen 9000, Intel’s next-generation desktop CPUs use an entirely new socket, so existing PCs will need to upgrade to a new motherboard, which will come at an additional cost.