Considering the fact that AMD has embargoed Ryzen Threadripper test results (for some media, at least) until tomorrow, it was with great surprise (OK, not really) when I spotted a GeekBench 3 result over at reddit last night, as I was trying to wind my brain down from a long day of benchmarking everything but Threadripper. We’ve yet to receive a chip (one is actively hitchhiking its way here), so that means I can sit back and actually enjoy seeing crazy numbers like these, without having to deal with the stress of making an embargo!
It’s not clear how redditor callingthewolf managed to get hold of one of the most coveted processors of this generation before its launch, but he was kind enough to whip up some quick overclocked results to share, giving those with idle thumbs, like myself, something to ogle over. Mucho appreciato, callingthewolf.
With liquid cooling, the 1950X was able to be clocked to 4.1GHz for all cores, something that might not seem so impressive on a quad- or eight-core, but is downright drool-worthy on a 16 core one. Considering the fact that AMD had liquid nitrogen on hand during an overclocking session at a press and analysts event a couple of weeks ago, I wondered just how hard Threadripper would be to overclock – but 4.1GHz steady on liquid sounds pretty damn good.
Scores have no meaning without comparison, so let’s rummage some up. When I tested Intel’s Core i7-6950X ten-core CPU a couple of months ago (under Linux), it achieved a multi-core score of 27,214. GeekBench errored out when I tried to test the i9-7900X, but I’d wager it’d deliver scores of around 33,000, based on the other performance gains seen. With that in mind, how crazy does 58,391 sound for an overclocked Threadripper?
The 4,548 single-thread score is a bit lacking (i7-7700K gets 5,474), but that’s to be expected given what we’ve seen from Ryzen. At the end of the day, suffering an IPC loss is going to be easily negated by the number of cores that are able to jump onto the same project.
It escaped my radar at the time, but callingthewolf also posted a Cinebench R15 result a week ago, with the same 4.1GHz overclock. Here, Threadripper scored an impressive 3,413 in the multi-thread test. For comparison, the i9-7900X in our testing scored 2,232. Making that even more impressive is the fact that the i9-7900X peaks to 4.0GHz on all cores; here, Threadripper gains almost 50% in the multi-thread test, with just a 100MHz advantage.
At this point, it’s really difficult to not feel excited for Threadripper, or the fact that AMD is striking Intel hard with this release. Based on these, and other leaked results, TR is a serious force to be reckoned with. The overall package is a lot more attractive than a dual-socket machine – crazy when you realize that the 1950X delivers the performance of one. Impressive stuff.