Intel’s Core i9-10900K has had more benchmarks leaked, with new 3DMark processor scores indicating that the incoming 10-core flagship handily beating AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X.

The benchmarks, spilled on Twitter by the ever-watchful TUM_APISAK, show the 10900K recording a score of 28,462 for Physics in Fire Strike Extreme, and a CPU result of 13,142 in Time Spy.

i9-10900K (3.7/5.1)FS - Physics Score 28462TS - CPU Score 13142R9 3900XFS - Physics Score 27137TS - CPU Score 12624For Comparison ⬇️https://t.co/se2Hn2KcRq pic.twitter.com/C7nySfbMtDFebruary 4, 2020

AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X hits 27,137 and 12,624 respectively in those benchmarks as you can see in the tweet above, meaning that in this comparison, Intel’s Comet Lake-S desktop champion beats it out fairly comfortably, by almost 5% and 4% respectively.

The tweet also indicates that the Core i9-10900K has a base clock of 3.7GHz, and boost to 5.1GHz as previously rumored.

That won’t be all-core boost, of course, but just single-core – although the 10900K is set to boost higher than the AMD’s 3900X, which has a maximum boost of 4.6GHz, and all-core boost of closer to the 4GHz mark (although that will vary from chip to chip, as ever). Previous speculation contends that the 10900K will have all-core boost to 4.8GHz.

Clocks not cores

The 3900X sports a couple more cores, being a 12-core affair, but Intel has been playing the ‘clock speeds are more important than cores’ card of late, and these 3DMark results would seem to back that up.

Although we have to bear in mind that leaked benchmarks should always be treated with caution, and of course you can only read so much into isolated pre-launch results.

It does seem, though, that Intel is endeavoring to squeeze everything it can out of its existing 14nm process, and apparently succeeding to remain more than competitive with AMD’s new 7nm chips – although the Comet Lake price to pay will undoubtedly be a higher level of power usage, particularly in comparison to Ryzen.

Indeed, there is speculation that the delay of the next-gen Comet Lake desktop CPUs is due to Intel struggling to get the power requirements of this flagship processor under control. At maximum load, we’ve heard whispers that the 10900K could demand 300W from the PC’s power supply.

Intel’s top-end 9th-gen processors can be pretty power-hungry themselves, so again, that rumor isn’t really a surprise (although equally, we can’t assume that it’s true of course).

There have been further rumors of the Comet Lake-S launch sliding, perhaps even to May, but the fact is Intel really needs to get the range out of the door as quickly as possible. Otherwise, these next-gen processors may end up coming too close to AMD’s launch of Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, which will be an entirely different performance ballgame (with perhaps up to a 20% performance increase on current Ryzen chips).

The other area in which Intel can be competitive is with pricing, and we’ve heard chatter that the chip giant does intend to drop the asking prices of more of its CPUs, so could that potentially mean these Comet Lake products?

That’s not clear by any means, but if it does happen, that will obviously be great news for consumers, as doubtless AMD will have to respond.

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Via PCGamesN