Highly anticipated: Intel's next X-series Core i9 processors are just around the corner, and courtesy of a sneaky Dell engineer, four of them have appeared in the Geekbench 4 database. Last week we met the 18-core behemoth i9-10980XE and the little 10-core i9-10900X, and now we've also glimpsed the 14-core i9-10940X and the 12-core i9-10920X. Performance boosts are solid, but will they be enough to compete with Zen 2-based Threadripper?
Let's dive immediately into the scores. For the following sneak-peak, we've used the online Geekbench scores from the same Dell 5820 workstation used by Dell for all their testing, so while this may not be the exact performance of the chips, they'll at least be configured and cooled the same (and thus appropriate for comparisons). To be clear, none of these tests were completed by TechSpot.
Apart from the Core i9-10980XE which achieves all of nothing over its predecessor, multi-core scores improved respectably by 10%, 11%, and 10% for the i9-10940X, i9-10920X, and i9-10900X.
Single-core scores don't improve quite so pleasingly, but despite YouTubers loving to game on these beasts, they are meant for multi-core workloads. Nonetheless, scores improved by 4%, 2%, 3% and 6% respectively, going down the lineup.
Overall, results are good for yet another iteration of 14nm. If AMD was still uncompetitive these indicators would suggest a large boost in performance for Intel, given the 9th-gen parts barely improved over their predecessors.
But with Ryzen 9 3950X coming in November with 16 cores for $749, and probably better per-core performance given other Ryzen benchmarks we've ran, it's hard to imagine these processors will be at all competitive in most workloads. Whenever they do release though, we'll have our test benches primed and ready to put AMD and Intel head to head once again.