Comet Lake-S desktop processors led by Intel Core i9-10900K post respectable Fire Strike Physics Scores but have yet to face AMD's Ryzen 4000 Vermeer CPUs

Tum Apisak has provided an interesting comparison of various Comet Lake-S desktop processors being tested on 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark. The focus was placed on the Physics Scores of the various chips, which makes sense as these results are more about the performance of the CPU part. The included 10th Gen processors were the i5-10400, i5-10600K, i7-10700, i7-10700K, and the i9-10900K.

The Fire Strike Physics Scores produced by the Comet Lake processors from Intel ranged from 17,803 for the i5-10400 (6 cores, 12 threads, 2.90 GHz base clock) to a quite impressive 29,083 for the i9-10900K (10 cores, 20 threads, 3.7 GHz base clock). The latter chip has already been compared with the Ryzen 9 3900X and was only just defeated by the AMD part, which can utilize 12 cores and 24 threads for higher performance. But the Ryzen 9 3900X was released in July 2019 and is based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture. How is Comet Lake-S going to fare against the upcoming Vermeer desktop processor series based on Zen 3 microarchitecture?

Although the listed Physics Scores are good, it seems that Intel hasn’t really thrown the gauntlet down hard enough to trouble AMD too much at present. For instance, the Intel Core i5-10400 (6/12; 65 W TDP) manages 17,803 while there are records of an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (6/12; 65 W TDP) drumming up scores of 16,391 and even 17,063 in the same test. There is still quite a bit of distance between the two rival scores, but the AMD part is nearly two years old and can be picked up for just US$124.99 at the moment!

Benchmarks for AMD’s Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs (Zen 2 Renoir) have just started appearing, but it will be the Vermeer family of Zen 3-based Ryzen 4000 CPUs, which is expected to start seeing daylight toward the end of 2020, that will be destroying benchmarks and possibly making Intel wonder what it can do to curtail the constant threat coming from AMD.

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