AMD's third-generation Ryzen processors are less than two weeks away from release and benchmarks of the new chips' capabilities are leaking out in increasing frequency. The latest one shows AMD's eight-core, 16-thread, Ryzen 3800X going head to head with an Intel 9900K in Geekbench and it absolutely decimates it in multithreaded workloads. However, it does fall behind by a noticeable margin in single threaded score.
As the WCCFTech report shows, the Ryzen 3800X was able to hit 34,059 points in multithreaded tasks, while the 9900K is only able to manage 31,471 in the same test. That's a near 10 percent uplift in performance over the 9900K. Compared to the last-generation AMD 2700X too, there's a near 40 percent increase.
Single threaded performance is less impressive, with the 3800X managing 5,406, where the 9900K hits 6,236. The 2700X is still far behind however, with 4,860, showing that the 3800X still represents a big improvement in clock speed and instructions per clock.
But why is this happening when AMD promised solid single core performance? It's partly down to clock speed, where the 9900K can boost to 5GHz on a single core to deliver An 11 percent clock speed improvement over the 3800X, but it's also likely a memory issue. In the tests conducted here, the 3800X was benched with DDR4-2133 memory. Ryzen CPUs use AMD's infinity fabric technology to stitch its various CPU cores together and the fabric's frequency is tied to memory speed. So slower memory means a slower chip.
Ryzen 3000 CPUs support 3,200MHz memory right out of the gate and overclocking can take it far further. We would expect the 3800X to be much more competitive if benched with quicker memory. Indeed, in Tom's expanded testing, the single threaded performance was narrowed to just one percent when the 9900K was tested with slower memory.
