A US$42 Alder Lake Celeron CPU packs enough grunt to match Intel Core i9-10900K's single-core performance

Intel’s Alder Lake processors have class-leading performance no matter the price segment. Recent Geekbench 5 benchmarks for the Intel Celeron G6900 have further cemented this fact. The Intel Celeron G6900 is the least powerful Alder Lake chip on the market with only two Golden Cove cores, no hyperthreading, no boost clock, and a base frequency of only 3.5 GHz. As it turns out, even with only two Golden Cove cores, the Celeron G6900 matches the 10^th gen Intel Core i9-10900K in single-core performance.

Spotted by BenchLeaks, the Celeron G6900 was running on an ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard, along with 16 GB of DDR4 memory. Because of the ASRock Z690M’s Base Frequency Boost (BFB) feature, the chip ran at an elevated 4.1 GHz instead of the stock 3.5 GHz. This slight increase in the base clock speed resulted in a single-core Geekbench 5 score of 1397 and a multi-core score of 2565 for the Celeron G6900. While the multi-core score is nothing to write home about, the single-core numbers match the Core i9-10900K’s single-core performance numbers of 1385.

In other words, the Celeron G6900, an Alder Lake chip that only costs US$42, delivers the same level of single-threaded performance as a chip that launched with an MSRP of more than US$450. This is an exceptional example of generational improvements making their way down the product stack, resulting in lower-tier CPUs matching the performance of flagship parts of yesteryear.

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