(Image credit: AMD)

A PC said to be using the yet to be released 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU appears to beat the 18-core, 36-thread Intel Core i9-9980XE in multi-core performance in a leaked Geekbench test result. The AMD CPU's 61,072 score is the highest we’ve ever seen from a consumer CPU.

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X vs. Intel Core i9-9980XE: Geekbench Results

Perhaps the craziest part about this is that Intel’s 18-core CPU sells for about $2,000, while AMD’s 3950X will be less than half of that at $750.

The results show the AMD chip besting the Intel one in single-core score (5,868 vs. 5,395). But it's the 3950X's multi-core score that's especially impressive, with a 31% advantage over the i9-9980XE, which scores (on average) only 46,618 points, according to Geekbench.

Granted, we don’t know the full story here and under which conditions the AMD CPU was tested. Geekbench shows the chip as having a 3.3 GHz base clock speed and a 4.3 GHz turbo clock speed, which may point to this chip being an engineering sample. That means that the Ryzen 9 3950X could show even better performance in the fall, as AMD advertised a 3.5-GHz base clock speed and a 4.7-GHz boosted clock speed for the chip.

Current Geekbench results put the Intel Core i9- 9900K above the AMD 3950X in single-thread performance (6,209 vs. 5,868), but if the AMD chip truly ran at 4.3 GHz turbo clock speed in the test, then it could reach around 6,400 points in the fall at 4.7 GHz.

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

At E3 this week, AMD announced its high-end consumer CPU for the new Ryzen 3000 series. It said that its own benchmarks show that the 3950X beats Intel’s 9960X, even without Intel’s chips being patched for the latest MDS flaws, which can reduce the performance of Intel’s chips by 10-20%, according to some third-party benchmarks.

Apparently, AMD adidn’t test the new chip on the latest Windows 10 1903, which brings a new scheduler that better handles the intercommunication between the Ryzen CPU Core Complexes (CCXs). Some users have claimed it has increased their CPU’s performance by over 10%, although it’s likely that some use will see a much bigger improvement than others.

The new benchmark results, if they are to be believed, seem to put AMD in an even better position against Intel’s highest-end consumer chips. However, we won’t know for sure until we see do our own testing this fall. If AMD’s 3950X can deliver anywhere close to the same performance as the i9-9980XE, the AMD chip could be a no-brainer for the budget-conscious looking for performance in this range.