A new leak today from the well-connected industry leaker APISAK teases good news for AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9 3950X, at least in comparison to Intel’s Cascade Lake-X platform. Two 3DMark Fire Strike test results were posted early Saturday, one each for the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X and 18-core i9-10980XE.

The tests are not direct system comparisons: the 3950X is paired with an RTX 2080 Ti and 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory at 3200MHz while the i9-10980XE relies on an RTX 2070 and 32GB of quad-channel memory at 2666MHz. However, when looking just at the CPU-focused Physics score of the Fire Strike test, the Ryzen 9 3950X outperforms the 10980XE by about 24 percent (32,082 vs. 25,838) despite its core count disadvantage.

The comparison is also of note because, traditionally, these two processor classes are not necessarily competitors: the 3950X still lies within AMD’s “mainstream” desktop lineup while the 10980XE is the flagship of Intel’s high-end desktop (HEDT) platform. AMD’s “traditional” competitor for Intel’s HEDT lineup is Threadripper, but while Intel HEDT does offer some advantages over Ryzen 3000 – primarily PCIe lanes – AMD’s aggressive push to increase cores and take the lead in terms of features like PCIe 4.0 has created a new opportunity for competition between these two platforms, particularly for users who prioritize core and thread count over system memory or PCIe lanes.

Today’s leak doesn’t provide 3DMark scores for the next Threadripper parts, but AMD has promised to begin the rollout of third-gen Threadripper processors in November alongside general availability of the 3950X.