40-core Sapphire Rapids dual-socket part outed on Geekbench, scores nearly 30K, but trails behind the likes of the Ryzen 9 5800X

@BenchLeaks recently spotted a Geekbench 4 listing for what appears to be a 40-core dual-socket Intel Sapphire Rapids configuration. The system scored a rather mediocre 31,000 on the multi-core test, which is actually lower than what consumer parts like the Ryzen 9 5800X score. Considering it’s an early engineering sample with a base clock under 2 GHz, though, we expect the final silicon to perform substantially better. 

Sapphire Rapids is powered by the same 10nm Golden Cove cores we expect to see in 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake parts later this year, though Sapphire Rapids Xeon parts themselves aren’t expected to hit the market until later in 2022.

Intel has been continuously ceding market share to AMD, both in the consumer and server spaces. In large part, this is because its 14nm refreshes just aren't competitive from a performance per watt perspective relative to top-end 7nm Zen 3 silicon.

However, Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids mark Intel’s move to the 10nm process in the desktop and server spaces. The efficiency gains from the die shrink and the IPC gains could be enough to swing the pendulum back in Intel’s direction. We’ll need to see how Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids chips perform in the real world first, though.

Buy the Rocket Lake i7-11700K here on Amazon.