AMD Ryzen 9 7950X trades blows with the Intel Core i9-13900K in Geekbench's single and multi-core tests

AMD made some bold claims at its Ryzen 7000 launch event yesterday. One of the slides highlighted the Zen 4 processors' Geekbench scores, all of which out-edged the Alder Lake-based Core i9-12900K. First-party claims are usually meant to be taken with a grain of salt, but it looks like AMD wasn't messing around this time. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X has shown up on Geekbench, and it performs exactly how AMD said it would.

In Geekbench's single-core test, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X scores 2,217, just a few points shy of the 2,275 figure presented on stage. Things look pretty good on the multi-core front as well, with the processor scoring 24,396 points. The test bench was running an unnamed board from Asus along with 32 GB of 6,000 MT/s DDR5 RAM. A previous Geekbench listing confirmed that the Raptor Lake-based Core i9-13900K scored 2,169 and 24,189 in the single and multi-core tests, respectively.

This is within spitting distance of the Ryzen 9 7950X. What makes the feat even more impressive for Team Red is the fact that it manages to keep up with a 24-core processor despite featuring only 16 cores. Then again one can't make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two because the Core i9-13900K packs a mix of performance and efficiency cores.

That said, Geekbench isn't the best benchmarking tool around as it doesn't stress the CPUs for long enough, eliminating important factors like thermal throttling and sustained power draw. Thankfully, the Core i9-13900K has already been tested extensively in other applications such as Cinebench. It is only a matter of time before the Ryzen 9 7950X is put through the paces, allowing for a more nuanced comparison between the two bigwigs.

Buy the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on Amazon