Intel breaks Cinebench R23 world record with its super powerful Sapphire Rapids chip
AMD Threadripper has been dethroned as world champion as Intel’s Xeon W9-3495X 56-core workstation processor absolutely crushes it in the industry standard Cinebench R23 benchmark.
Cinebench R23, in case you haven’t used it yet, is a visual rendering benchmark that splits an image into individual segments that are each pulled onto the screen sequentially. The more processing cores and threads you have available to draw those segments, the faster the full image can be rendered and the higher a processor’s resulting score will be.
For the longest time, the AMD Threadripper line of workstation chips has held the top spot, thanks to their ample number of processing cores, with the Threadripper 3995X and 5995X each boasting 64 cores and 128 threads. This normally gives the Threadripper chips a significant advantage over Intel’s competing Xeon chips, which really surprised us with these results, as the Intel Xeon W9-3495X has eight fewer cores and 16 fewer threads.
Still, despite the lower core and thread count, the W9-3495X managed to achieve 132,484 points in Cinebench R23 multicore performance. This is more than 10,000 points higher than the previous world record holder, the AMD Threadripper 5995WX, which scored 121,215.
While this is a huge win for Intel, and certainly comes with bragging rights, these could be short-lived. If WCftech (opens in new tab) notes, AMD’s Zen 4 Threadripper chips are on their way, and a 64-core/128-thread Threadripper 7995WX could very well recapture the crown before the year is out.
This is great for Intel, but why should I care?
The new world record for Cinebench R23 is certainly impressive, but it’s also an incredibly niche record for most people and would be very hard to match again.
Both the Intel and AMD records were set using chips cooled by special liquid nitrogen setups – not something you’re likely to have on hand even if you had an Intel Xeon W9-3495X, which isn’t likely since the Xeon and Threadripper line of chips are high-end workstation kits costing many thousands of dollars.
In addition, these records were achieved by overclocking the processor to achieve faster frequencies, in this case about 184% faster than the standard clock frequency the Xeon chip was designed for.
However, this still matters to the average consumer. The improvements to the Intel Xeon’s instructions-per-clock (IPC) that broke the world record won’t be limited to Intel’s Xeon lineup. And we can expect them to find their way into the manufacturer’s chips for the consumer market in the coming years, just as the improvements AMD is making to its Zen 4 Threadrippers will benefit the entire processor line-up in the future.
So the further Intel and AMD can push their best processors, even if they’re for workstation PCs, anyone looking for the best gaming PC all the way up to the best Chromebook will benefit from the engineering used to break this world record. produce.