One eager beaver PC builder has decided it can't wait any longer and has spilt the beans on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D mega chip, two weeks before all the reviews
If you're someone who spends a lot of time gaming and using the same rig to grind through demanding content creation tasks, you might be holding off buying a PC upgrade until the reviews of AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 9 9950X3D go online. But if you're as impatient as one particular system builder, pretty much everything you need to know about how well the chip performs is now out in the wild.
The eager beaver in question is a Bulgarian company, PCBuild, which published some benchmark results for AMD's most powerful desktop CPU on Facebook before taking the post down. Fortunately, Videocardz managed to snag all the juicy details before it disappeared.
Ostensibly nothing more than a Zen 5 version of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, the 9950X3D is a 16-core, 32-thread processor, split equally over two CCDs (Core Complex Dies). As with its predecessor, the new CPU has 64 MB for 3D V-Cache bonded underneath one of the CCDs, with the other one left as normal.
PCBuild posted a screenshot of the core clock speeds, while the chip was grinding through a Cinebench R23 benchmark, and one can see that the first eight cores hit a maximum of 5.4 GHz, whereas the other eight hit 5.7 GHz. That difference in speed is due to the presence of 3D V-Cache and we saw how the extra cache required the clocks to be reduced in the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
The Ryzen 7 9700X has a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, whereas the 9800X3D is 300 MHz slower at 5.2 GHz. It looks like AMD has used the same clock reduction for the 9950X3D because the 9950X, on which it is based, has a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz for both chiplets.
As for the results themselves, PCBuild posted a single core score of 2,279 and a multi-core score of 42,413 in Cinebench R23, which is there or thereabouts the same as a Ryzen 9 9950X.
The reason why they're so similar is because in cases where every core is loaded to the hilt, the clock speeds drop right down, and PCBuild had shown figures suggesting the chip ran at an all-core speed of 4.9 GHz
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