It looks like we’re closing in on what appears to be another launch of an Intel CPU lineup. Otherwise there is no way explaining why there are this many leaks surfacing regarding unreleased products. Some forum user from Dutch website Hardware.info has apparently had his hands on an upcoming Intel Core i9 7900X (10 core) as well as an Intel core i9 7920X (12 core).

Both of the upcoming chips have been tested using a benchmark called “Userbenchmark”. Since I’ve personally never toyed around with this suite I downloaded and ran it checking what one of my “office PC’s” can achieve. The particular system I’m sitting in front of atm is equipped with an Intel Core i7-7700K processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card and Klevv memory running at some mere 2133 MHz (I like stability). Regarding the relevant integer and floating point numbers my system scored 139 Points Single core, 499 Points Quad core and 733 Points Multi core. Now that we’ve established some sort of a baseline for this benchmark the numbers from the user from Hardware.info forums.

The 10 core Skylake X part was able to score 107 Points Single core, 434 Points Quad core and 1467 Point Multi Core. In the case of the rather massive 12 core Skylake X chip the results were 130 Points Single core, 502 Points Quad Core and 1760 Points Multi core.

Comparing the results to a Core i7-7700K it becomes clearly visible that the upcoming Skylake parts have a lower max Turbo clock than the current Kaby Lake mainstream chip, since this one cranks out 139 Points Single core the others are approximately 23% (i9 7900X) and 6.5% (i9 7920X) slower. Moving on to the quad core testing routine we see that the Core i7-7700K scores 499 points, while the i9-7900K achieves 434 Points (13% slower) and the Core i9-7920X reaches 502 Points (0.6% quicker). As expected the whole picture really starts to change when looking at Multi core performance. While the i7-7700K reaches 733 points the i9-7900X cranks out 1467 Points (200.1% faster) and the i9-7920X achieves 1760 Points (240.1% faster).

On another note it’s rather important to know that the Core i9-7900X was running at 3.1 GHz and the Core i9-7920X ran the test routine at 3.25 GHz, which stands into comparison to the 4.5 GHz the Core i7-7700K was running at. Normalizing the values we see that the IPC performance of the Core i9-7900X is 11.7% higher than the i7-7700K’s. Normalizing the IPC of the Core i9-7920X on the Core i7-7700K we see that the difference in IPC performance is 29.5% in favor of the new Skylake X part.

The fact that it appears that the IPC performance of the upcoming Skylake X parts in an integer test is up to 29.5% higher than with the current Skylake Core i7-7700K actually comes as a rather big surprise to us. After – what felt like – countless launches without any reasonable gain in IPC performance, we finally see a boost in performance per clock. Nevertheless, the there are huge differences regarding the gains in IPC performance between the two upcoming Core i9 parts and that actually makes us question either the results we’re looking at here or the reliability/stability of the benchmark that was used.

So far we would strongly recommend taking these results with more than just a grain of salt – maybe better a handful of salt – and wait until some proper reviews or even leaks come along.