No wonder Intel effectively halved the price of its new 10th-generation Core i9 HEDT chips: it knew AMD's mainstream, high-end solution was about to beat it. The upcoming, 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU is shown able to beat out Intel's 18-core Core i9-10980XE in single and multicore benchmarks in pre-release testing.
AMD's Ryzen 3000 series has been an impressive new range of CPUs since their July debut, with standouts like the eight-core 3700X and 12-core 3900X really showing the potential of the Zen 2 architecture and all the improvements it's brought to single and multi-threaded usage. They provide credible competition for Intel's mainstream gaming CPUs, like the Core i7-9700K and the Core i9-9900K, but they also offer fantastic competition for Intel's HEDT chips.
Intel recently countered this problem, from its perspective, by cutting the price of its current and new-gen HEDT chips, pricing its flagship 10980XE at just $975, where its predecessor debuted at $2,000. But that may still not be enough, as early benchmarks suggest AMD's incoming 16-c0re, 32 thread 3950X is better, and it's only going to cost $750.
The results appeared on the Geekbench database and showed an Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition vs Dell Precision 5820 Tower X Series. One had an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, and the other an Intel Core i9-10980XE. The single core performance was 5,570 vs 5,453, respectively, and the multi-core performance was 52,098 vs. 51,180.
That's a damning indictment of Intel's new chip range and shows that AMD truly has the top performing chips unless all you do is game. Intel should be very worried about what the incoming Threadripper 3000 CPUs will be able to do.