CPU Tests
Want the best-possible IPC for light-load tasks? Intel Core remains the way to go. AMD, however, has made significant strides into increasing its own IPC, and it's immediately telling that the 16C32T Ryzen 9 3950X is actually the fastest AMD chip in the extensive line-up.
Much was previously made of AMD's 3rd Gen Ryzen chips not achieving their rated boost speeds, oftentimes by 200MHz or so. The recent AGESA 1.0.0.4 update appears to have cured the problem. Benchmarking PCMark 10's app start-up test, which is a good proxy for light-load work, shows the Ryzen 9 3950X getting close to its 4.7GHz boost at least part of the time.
Cranking out massive numbers in multi-threaded applications is the Ryzen 9 3950X's forte. Remember when the Ryzen 7 1800X - the first of the line - seemed really quick for a chip residing on a mainstream platform? The new head honcho is over 2.5x as fast.
It's also impressive that there's 83 percent scaling from the 8C16T Ryzen 7 3800X to this chip.
In fact, the best Ryzen is also faster than an 18C36T Intel Core i9-7980XE released a couple of years ago armed with a £2,000 price tag. Letting you into a peek of upcoming CPUs, that model scores 'only' 7,772 in this test.
If you thought Ryzen 9 3900X was extremely fast, think again. An extra two cores and four threads, along with decent frequency, makes the 3950X a mainstream monster.
Our logs show the sample chip, provided directly by AMD, runs at an all-core speed of between 3.92GHz and 3.975GHz depending upon workload. Having effectively 64GHz of core power plays well with Blender, and it keeps that 2.5x improvement over Ryzen 7 1800X.
