AMD announced its Ryzen 8000G series of Zen 4-based desktop APUs earlier this month, with an official product launch date: January 31. The top models within this range are the "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors—Olrak29_ took to social media after spotting pre-release examples popping up on the Geekbench Browser database. It is highly likely that evaluation samples are in the hands of reviewers, and more benchmarked results are expected to be uploaded over the next week and a half. The Ryzen 7 8700G (w/ Radeon 780M Graphics) was benched on an ASUS ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI board with 32 GB (6398 MT/s) of DDR5 system memory. Leaked figures appeared online last weekend, originating from an Ryzen 5 8600G (w/ Radeon 760M Graphics) paired with an MSI B650 GAMING PLUS WIFI (MS-7E26) motherboard and 32 GB (6400 MT/s) of DDR5 RAM.

The Geekbench 6 results reveal that the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G APUs are slightly less performant than "Raphael" Ryzen 7000 non-X processors—not a massive revelation, given the underlying technological similarities between these AMD product lines. Evaluations could change with the publication of official review data, but the 8000G series is at a natural disadvantage here—lower core clock frequencies and smaller L3 cache designations are the likely culprits. The incoming APUs are also somewhat hobbled with PCIe support only reaching 4.0 standards. VideoCardz, Tom's Hardware and Wccftech have taken the time to compile the leaked Geekbench 6 results into handy comparison charts—very much worth checking out.

Intel's forthcoming Core Ultra 7 1002H "Meteor Lake" mobile CPU has been sighted a few times, thanks to samples turning up on the Geekbench Browser database. We are months away from the official launch day—December 14—but multiple models have been leaking out since late summer. Team Blue has used different designations for evaluation and qualification silicon—we can assume that another Ultra 7 165H appearing online (courtesy of Geekbench 6.1 tests) has concreted that nomenclature as the finished/final article. Model codes and hierarchy information were not made available at Intel Innovation 2023 (last week), where Team Blue reps discussed Meteor Lake's AI-crunching capabilities.

Leaked information shows the Core Ultra 7 1002H being nigh identical in terms of specifications (16 cores/22 threads) and engineering platform (MTL-P). Benchmarked results between the engineering sample (1002H) and Core Ultra 7 165H are pretty close—respectively: 2439 versus 2502 (single-core) and 12668 versus 12545 (multi-core). We are seeing a slight improvement in single-threaded performance, but the prototype edges out its newer counterpart by 123 points. Both units were benched on an "Intel Corporation Meteor Lake Client Platform," using balanced power plans in Windows 11 (Pro and Enterprise, respectively).

An interesting system popped up on Geekbench Browser early this morning—on initial inspection the evaluated high-end PC was sporting hardware of 2021-vintage, but its graphics card was observed as an outlier. The Intel Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake-S) CPU was sitting on an MSI MPG Z690 Carbon WiFi mainboard, with 64 GB of DDR5 SDRAM (3990 MT/s). The benchmarked computer was running Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (64-bit) on a power saver (economizador) plan. According to the entry's OpenCL information section we are looking at an attached GPU device called "GFX1102 ID," the board name is revealed to be "AMD Radeon PRO W7600" with 8 GB of VRAM. This lower-end alternative to existing (RDNA 3) Radeon Pro models—W7900 (48 GB) and W7800 (32 GB)—could be nearing a public launch.

This information aligns the workstation-oriented card with AMD's Navi 33 GPU—the same GFX1102 designation appears within TPU's database entry (look at the Shader ISA (GFX11.0) graphics feature). VideoCardz reckons that the leaked Radeon PRO W7600 is closely related to AMD's mobile Radeon RX 7700/7600 series—based on Navi 33, due to their matching IDs. Their report proposed: "Based on this data, the GPU is expected to have a clock speed of 1940 MHz. Comparatively, this is 310 MHz lower than the Radeon RX 7600 gaming model, which refers to its Game Clock of 2250 MHz. The Compute Unit field refers to "Workgroup Processor/WGP" cluster, so the card features 32 Compute Units or 2048 Stream Processors, the same configuration as the RX 7600. The card is listed with 8 GB of memory, but it remains uncertain whether this model will support ECC (error correction), a feature found in the W7900/W7800 models. It's important to note that the W6600 did not utilize this type of memory."

A new entry has appeared on the Geekbench Browser database—very early this morning—apparently pointing to the lowest model sitting within the ranks of Intel's Alder Lake-N CPU series. According to leaked Geekbench 6.1 test results, as spotted by Benchleaks, the evaluated system was running on an "Intel N50" processor. This truly entry-point 6 W TDP SoC seems to feature two Gracemont efficiency cores with a 997 MHz base clock and a boost capability of 3.4 GHz. You are not getting any hyper-threading here. The integrated GPU is reported to sport 16 Execution Units—the more powerful N200, Core i3-N305 and Core i3-N300 Alder Lake-N siblings have double that count (32 EUs).

The benchmarked N50 system achieved overall scores of 1054 (single core) and 1388 (multi-threaded). Geekbench Browser states that the tested build had 8 GB of RAM (single channel), with the OS being Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC (64-bit) on a balanced power plan. VideoCardz was somewhat impressed with the plucky 6 W TDP chip offering comparable performance to decade old CPUs, albeit with a much lower power draw. The N50's single core result positions it closer to Intel fourth Gen Core Haswell mobile processors or first generation Ryzen CPUs, but the multi-core score is a bit of letdown—perhaps comparable to Intel Core 2 and AMD FX series models.

The Puget Systems benchmark database outed AMD's Ryzen 5 7500F 6-core/12-thread processor last week—industry experts proposed that it was the first example of a Ryzen 7000 SKU with a disabled iGPU. A South Korean retailer indicated unit pricing of around $170-180, with a possible local launch date on July 7. It seems that retail units have not hit the market (at the time of writing), but Geekbench 6.1 results have since appeared online. According to an entry on the Geekbench database—that was spotted by Olrak29 earlier today—the Ryzen 5 7500F has a base clock of 3.7 GHz. It can boost up to 5.0 GHz on a single core, while all cores can reach a maximum of 4.8 GHz. The listing confirms that this new SKU sits firmly in the AMD "Raphael" CPU family.

The processor was tested on a system running Microsoft Windows 11—partial specifications of the evaluation build include an ASUS TUF Gaming A620M-PLUS WIFI motherboard and 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM. The tested Ryzen 5 7500F CPU achieved scores of 2782 points (single-core) and 13323 points (multi-threaded), which places it slightly ahead of the Ryzen 5 7600X in multi-thread performance. It trails slightly behind with its single-core result, but these figures are impressive considering that the Ryzen 5 7500F will likely be offered at a more budget friendly price when compared to its closest iGPU-enabled siblings.

NVIDIA is launching its lower end GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card series next week, but has kept schtum about the smaller Ada Lovelace AD107 GPU's performance level. This more budget-friendly offering (MSRP $299) is rumored to have 3,072 CUDA cores, 24 RT cores, 96 Tensor cores, 96 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. It will likely sport 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus. Benchleaks has discovered the first set of test results via a database leak, and posted these details on social media earlier today. Two Geekbench 6 runs were conducted on a test system comprised of an Intel Core i5-13600K CPU, ASUS Z790 ROG APEX motherboard, DDR5-6000 memory and the aforementioned GeForce card.

The GPU Compute test utilizing the Vulkan API resulted in a score of 99419, and another using OpenCL achieved 105630. We are looking at a single sample here, so expect variations when other units get tested in Geekbench prior to the June 29 launch. The RTX 4060 is about 12% faster (in Vulkan) than its direct predecessor—RTX 3060. The gap widens with its Open CL performance, where it offers an almost 20% jump over the older card. The RTX 3060 Ti presents around 3-5% faster performance over the RTX 4060. We hope to see actual in-game benchmarking carried out soon.

Primate Labs has released the newest update to its cross-platform CPU and GPU benchmark that measures your system's performance, Geekbench 6.1. The latest version brings new features and improvements, including the upgrade to Clang 16, an increased workload gap that should minimize thermal throttling on some devices, as well as introduces support for SVE and AVX 512- FP 16 instructions, and support for fixed-point math. The update also improves multi-core performance.

These changes result in Geekbench 6.1 single-scores to be up to 5 percent higher and multi-core scores up to 10 percent higher, compared to Geekbench 6.0 scores. Due to these differences, Primate Labs recommends that users do not compare scores between Geekbench 6.0 and Geekbench 6.1. Geekbench 6.1 is also a recommended update, according to Primate Labs.

Benchmark results for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC appeared on Geekbench Browser early yesterday morning, under the designation Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen. This chipset is tipped to be a successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which was launched at the end of 2021 as the world's first 5 nm Arm-based SoC for Windows laptops. A tipster on Twitter has highlighted the very underwhelming results posted by the next gen chipset, and these figures would indicate that an engineering sample was the test subject, not final silicon. The 8-core Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is shown to outperform its supposed successor, and the clock frequencies for the latter appear to be lower than anticipated.

The Geekbench 5 database entry for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 also reveals details about its specifications - a 12-core configuration that is split into eight performance cores and four power-efficiency ones. The base core frequency is listed as being 2.38 GHz, and the benchmark was completed under a Balanced Power plan in Windows 11 Home Insider Preview. 16 GB of RAM was used in the test kit, although earlier leaks have indicated that the chipset can support up to a maximum of 64 GB LPDDR5 RAM.

A few days ago, we reported a strange Intel Core i5-12490F processor that appeared in the Chinese marketplace. The processor uses the C0 silicon that Intel sits on a pile of and repurposes it to make these odd chips for Asian markets. As we found out, this C0 silicon is a heavily cut-down version, with only six high-performance P-cores present. Compared to the regular Core i5-12400F, it has a bigger L3 cache arriving at 20 MB and slightly higher clock speeds where the base stands at 3.0 G and a boost frequency that manages to ramp up to 4.6 GHz. As a reference, the regular Core i5-12400F has 18 MB of L3 cache, a base frequency of 2.5 GHz, and a boost speed of 4.4 GHz.

Thanks to the early benchmarks, we have the performance numbers in two cases where Intel's Core i5-12490F model is compared to the regular Core i5-12400F. According to the GeekBench data, the first case proves that higher clock speeds of the strange processor, coupled with higher L3 cache, prove to be of help as the single-threaded performance grows by 10%. In comparison, the multi-threaded results show an even more considerable improvement at 15%. The second test shows smaller margins compared to the Core i5-12500, where the Core i5-12490F processor now only leads by 2.5% and 5% in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, respectively. This indicates that we have to wait for more benchmarks to see how this design stands in the Alder Lake family and see just how big of an improvement comes from higher frequencies and bigger L3 cache.

Microsoft announced that as part of Windows 11 Android applications would be natively supported as if they were desktop apps. The Windows Subsystem for Android will enable this support through emulation and is derived from the Windows Subsystem for Linux added in Windows 10. Microsoft has been working with Intel and Amazon to integrate their Bridge Technology and Appstore to improve the performance and experience of using Android apps. We have recently seen a slew of Geekbench results from devices running the Windows Subsystem for Android which reveals what we can expect in terms of performance.

The listings show Geekbench 5 single-core scores ranging from 107 - 828 and multi-core scores between 439 - 4908 which indicates that performance could far exceed that of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 on the high-end. We cannot determine the specific desktop processor used in each benchmark so these results can only be interpreted as a potential range. Microsoft has announced that Android support won't be available in Windows 11 at launch and will instead come as a future update.

When AMD announced its Ryzen 5000 series of processors based on the new Zen 3 architecture, the performance of these processors was the best on the market. Even in our own testing, we have found that AMD's Zen 3 core is the highest performing core on the market, even beating Intel's latest and greatest, the 10th generation of Core processors. However, Intel has been doing some silent work and the company has developed a new core to be used in the 11th generation "Rocket Lake" platform. Codenamed Cypress Cove, the design is representing a backport of the 10 nm Sunny Cove design, supposed to bring around 19% IPC improvement across the board.

If you were wondering if that was enough to catch up with AMD's Zen 3 IPC performance, look no further because we have Geekbench 5 performance results of Intel's 35 Watt Core i9-11900T processor. Having a base frequency of only 1.51 GHz, the CPU is capable of boosting one or two cores to the very high speed of 4.9 GHz, giving us a good example of the single-threaded performance we can expect from this CPU. In GB5 tests, the Core i9-11900T has managed to score 1717 points in the single-threaded test and 8349 points in multi-threaded results. Comparing that to something like AMD Ryzen 5800X, which scores 1674 points in single-threaded results, Rocket Lake's Cypress Cove core has managed to be 2.5% faster than Zen 3. However, in multi-threaded results, the AMD chip is unmatched as the low TDP of the Intel processor is stopping it from reaching full performance.

With the launch of AMD's next-generation mobile processors just around the corner, with an expected launch date in the beginning of 2021 at the CES virtual event. The Cezanne lineup, as it is called, is based on AMD's latest Zen 3 core, which brings many IPC improvements, along with better frequency scaling thanks to the refined architecture design. Today, we get to see just how much the new Cezanne generation brings to the table thanks to the GeekBench 5 submission. In the test system, a Ryzen 5 5600H mobile processor was used, found inside of a Xiaomi Mi Notebook, paired with 16 GB of RAM.

As a reminder, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H is a six-core, twelve threaded processor. So you are wondering how the performance looks like. Well, in the single-core test, the Zen 3 enabled core has scored 1372 points, while the multi-threaded performance result equaled 5713 points. If we compare that to the last generation Zen 2 based "Renoir" design, the equivalent Ryzen 5 4600H processor, the new design is about 37% faster in single-threaded, and about 14% faster in multi-threaded workloads. We are waiting for the announcement to see the complete AMD Cezanne lineup and see the designs it will bring.

Intel is still in the work of testing and certification for their more complex graphics products based on their Xe microarchitectures, and that means that some tests are being done in well-known benchmarking platforms. Case in point, an Intel Xe GPU with a reported 128 EUs (1024 shading units), 3 GB of memory, and a clockspeed of 1.4 GHz ran through Geekbench, where it scored an... interesting 9,311 points in the OpenCL test.

This is more likely than not an engineering sample, considering that Intel's Iris Xe MAX wrapped in its Tiger Lake package can score up to 23,000 points. It is currently unclear if this particular Xe manifestation is running on Intel's Xe-LP or Xe-HPG architecture. This might be Intel's DG-2 product, which offers higher performance than their DG-1 discrete graphics card that is only available for system integrators.

AMD's Zen 3 core has seen some major performance uplift, with the first products based on it being the 5000 series desktop processors codenamed "Vermeer". With the efficiency that this new core brings and IPC increase, it is only a matter of time before it scales down to mobile processors. Today, thanks to the findings of TUM APISAK, we get to see some performance results of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 5800H "Cezanne" processors. Benchmarked in the Geekbench 5 test suite, the CPU was spotted running at the base frequency of 3.20 GHz, and boost frequency of 4.44 GHz. This is only an engineering sample so the real product may have different clock speeds.

The CPU managed to score 1475 points in single-threaded results while having 7630 points in a multi-threaded scenario. If you wonder how does it fare to the last generation that it replaces, the Ryzen 7 4800H scored 1194 points for ST, and 7852 points for MT. That means that the new Ryzen 7 5800H CPU has a 23% performance boost for ST workloads, showing the Zen 3 capability. The MT score is not representative as we do not have the final product yet, so we have to wait and see how it performs when reviews arrive.

Today, in the latest GeekBench 5 submission by ASUS, we have discovered something rather interesting. Intel's Ice Lake-SP processors were rumored to arrive with up to 28 cores and 56 threads at maximum, on a single chip. That was due to the 10 nm process used to make these chips, with suspicions that the yield of the node was not good enough to make any higher core count parts. Thanks to the GB5 listing, discovered by Leakbench on Twitter, the Intel Ice Lake-SP CPU engineering sample appeared with an amazing 36 cores with 72 threads. This is supposedly Intel's efforts to try and match the 64 cores and 128 threads of AMD's EPYC "Rome" CPUs, which are winning many server applications due to their performance.

The 36C/72T chip was paired with another similar chip in a 2P dual-socket configuration, which made the total core count rise to 72 cores and 144 threads, running inside of Asustek's Y4R-A1-ASUS-G1 server. The system was reporting a clock frequency of 3.6 GHz base speed, which means that the possible boost clocks could be higher. The CPU features a 1.25 MB level two (L2) cache per core (45 MB in total) and 54 MB of unified level three (L3) cache. That makes this CPU core quite an improvement over the past Cooper Lake generation. We are waiting for more information about these CPUs, and we are going to report on it in the coming time.

AMD has launched its RDNA 2 based graphics cards, codenamed Navi 21. These GPUs are set to compete with NVIDIA's Ampere offerings, with the lineup covering the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards. Until now, we have had reviews of the former two, but not the Radeon RX 6900 XT. That is because the card is coming at a later date, specifically on December 8th, in just a few days. As a reminder, the Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU is a Navi 21 XTX model with 80 Compute Units that give a total of 5120 Stream Processors. The graphics card uses a 256-bit bus that connects the GPU with 128 MB of its Infinity Cache to 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. When it comes to frequencies, it has a base clock of 1825 MHz, with a boost speed of 2250 MHz.

Today, in a GeekBench 5 submission, we get to see the first benchmarks of AMD's top-end Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. Running an OpenCL test suite, the card was paired with AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X 16C/32T CPU. The card managed to pass the OpenCL test benchmarks with a score of 169779 points. That makes the card 12% faster than RX 6800 XT GPU, but still slower than the competing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, which scores 177724 points. However, we need to wait for a few more benchmarks to appear to jump to any conclusions, including the TechPowerUp review, which is expected to arrive once NDA lifts. Below, you can compare the score to other GPUs in the GeekBench 5 OpenCL database.

Last year, in November of 2019, a startup company called NUVIA Inc. broke out of the stealth mode and decided to reveal itself to the public. Focused on "re-imagining silicon", the company is led by some of the brightest minds in the semiconductor industry. Some people like Gerard Williams III, the CEO of the company, previously served as a chief CPU architect at Apple and has spent over 10 years at Arm before that. Others like Manu Gulati and John Bruno serve as senior vice presidents of silicon and system engineering respectively. Together, their people are forming a company full of well-known industry names. Of course, there are more and you should check out this page.

NUVIA Inc. promises to deliver only the best performance and "re-imagine silicon" as they say. Today, we got some bold claims from the company regarding the performance of their upcoming Phoenix SoC. Using Geekbench 5, the company has provided some simulated results of how the Phoenix SoC will perform. Being that it runs on Arm ISA, the SoC can run at very low power and achieve good performance. NUVIA has run some simulations and it expects its Phoenix SoC to be 40-50% faster in single-threaded performance than Zen 2/Sunny Cove at just a third of the power, 33% of the percent of power to be precise. In the graph below, NUVIA has placed its SoC only in 5 W range, however, the company said that they have left the upper curve to be disclosed at later date, meaning that the SoC will likely compete in high-performance markets and at higher power targets. While these claims are to be taken with a grain of salt, it is now a waiting game to see how NUVIA realizes its plans.

Intel's 11th Generation Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processors in the LGA1200 package could come with clock speeds that are of the norm these days. Intel appears unwilling to dial down clock speeds in the wake of increased IPC with the new generation "Cypress Cove" CPU cores that drive these processors. Twitter handle "leakbench," which tracks interesting Geekbench results, fished out a database listing for a "Rocket Lake-S" engineering sample with clock speeds of 3.40 GHz base, and 5.00 GHz boost.

The listing has all the telltale signs of "Cypress Cove," such as 48 KB L1D cache, 512 KB per core L2 cache, and 16 MB shared L3 cache for this 8-core/16-thread chip. "Cypress Cove" is rumored to be to be a back-port of Intel's "Willow Cove" CPU core design from its original 10 nm+ node to the 14 nm++. VideoCardz compared this "Rocket Lake-S" ES benchmark result to that of a retail Core i7-10700K, and found its single-threaded performance to be roughly 6.35 percent higher despite a 200 MHz clock-speed deficit, although for some reason, its multi-threaded performance is trailing by over 15 percent.

Intel's upcoming Extreme Edition Core i9-10980XE from the Cascade Lake-X family. Cascade Lake-X (CSL-X) will be Intel's next take on the High End Desktop (HEDT) systems. The Core i9-10980XE is pegged as the flagship on that lineup, sporting an 18-core, 36-thread design, and are still based on Intel's 14 nm process node. These processors will be pin-compatible with Intel's LGA 2066 platform. Caches are expected to be set at 1.125 MB, 18 MB and 24.75 MB of L1, L2 and L3.

Base clocks set in the Geekbench 4 entry are set at 4.1 GHz, with a maximum boost of 4.7 GHz. That's a lot of frequency on a 14 nm CPU with 18 cores; if previous entries on the Intel HEDT family (such as the i9-9980XE) sported a 165 W TDP with clocks of 3.0 GHz and 4.4 GHz respectively, it seems highly unlikely that Intel will keep the same TDP for the i9-10980XE - and even if they do, power consumption will certainly be higher. Those reported clocks for the i9-10980XE may not be right, however - we don't know the conditions of the test run.

Primate Labs, developers of the ubiquitous benchmarking application GeekBench, have announced the release of version 5 of the software. The new version brings numerous changes, and one of the most important (since if affects compatibility) is that it will only be distributed in a 64-bit version. Some under the hood changes include additions to the CPU benchmark tests (including machine learning, augmented reality, and computational photography) as well as increases in the memory footprint for tests so as to better gauge impacts of your memory subsystem on your system's performance. Also introduced are different threading models for CPU benchmarking, allowing for changes in workload attribution and the corresponding impact on CPU performance.

On the Compute side of things, GeekBench 5 now supports the Vulkan API, which joins CUDA, Metal, and OpenCL. GPU-accelerated compute for computer vision tasks such as Stereo Matching, and augmented reality tasks such as Feature Matching are also available. For iOS users, there is now a Dark Mode for the results interface. GeekBench 5 is available now, 50% off, on Primate Labs' store.

When we said AMD was readying a presentation on their Ryzen 9 3950X CPUs to awe crowds at E3, we weren't thinking of something of this magnitude. But apparently, it's true: a Geekbench test result has shown AMD's $750, 16 core, 32 thread Ryzen 9 9 3950X beating Intel's 18 core, 36 thread $2,000 i9-9980XE monster. Now, you may be thinking: ok, it beat it because of AMD's announced 4.7 GHz boost, and did so only on single threaded performance, obviously... but you would be wrong.

The Geekbench scores show AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X delivering 5,868 points in single, and 61,072 points in multicore workloads. Intel's i9-9980XE, on the other hand, scores just 5,391 single core, and 46,876 multicore points (on average and at stock clocks of 3,000 MHz base and 3,400 MHz boost). This is an incredible performance difference (particularly in the multicore score), and was apparently done with an engineering sample for AMD's upcoming chip that didn't even run at its announced 4.3 GHz base and 4.7 GHz boost clocks, but at 3.3 GHz and 4.3 GHz respectively. AMD's 105 W TDP, 16 core chip beats Intel's 185 W TDP, 18 core one... Where has the world come? Take the usual dosage of NaCl, and let's keep things in perspective - even if AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X equals, and doesn't beat, Intel's i9-9980XE, it's still a huge win for the red company. Almost as big a win as that huge stone on Lisa's hand.

With the swanky Core i9-9900K and Core i7-9700K eight-core chips getting all the attention, the less glamorous Core i5-9600K is taking shape, which could bring a little more performance to the $250 price-point. This 6-core/6-thread chip succeeds the current-gen i5-8600K, and has the same 9 MB of L3 cache. With not much in the way of micro-architectural IPC improvements, barring silicon-level hardening against certain vulnerabilities, which could improve speculative execution performance (versus processors with software patches that inflict performance penalties); Intel has dialed up clock speeds. The chip is clocked at 3.70 GHz, with a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.60 GHz, compared to the 3.60 GHz nominal and 4.30 GHz Turbo Boost frequencies of its predecessor.

The higher clocks seem to bring the i5-9600K a touch higher than the i5-8600K in terms of GeekBench scores, although still nowhere close to the i7-8700 (non-K). The i5-8600K, if you'll recall, beat some of its pricier previous-generation siblings such as the i7-7700, in multi-threaded tests. Someone with access to an i5-9600K put it through GeekBench 4. The chip scores 6,015 points in the single-core test or about 3.7 percent faster than its predecessor (the i5-8600K typically scores 5,800 points), coming from the 300 MHz higher single-core boost. The multi-core score is 23,393 points, which is a meager 2 percent faster (the i5-8600K typically scores around 23,000 points). The generational jump in performance for the mid-range hence seems to have stagnated. At best the i5-9600K will repair the uncertain price/performance equation the i5-8600K has against the AMD Ryzen 5 2600X.

As we grow ever closer to the launch of AMD's 2000-series, details and scores are expected to be revealed in increasingly faster fashion. Today, some Geekbench benchmarks (reportedly) of an AMD 2700X CPU have appeared, shedding some light on the expected performance - and performance improvement - of the new AMD top-of-the-line CPU.

The Ryzen 7 2700X CPU that has been tested achieved scores of 4746 single core and 24772 multi-core, which show some interesting improvements over the original flagship Ryzen 7 1800X. The official Geekbench baseline scores for AMD's 1800X are 4249 and 21978, respectively, for single and multicore benchmarks. This means that the new 2700X, which is expected to carry an increased 100 MHz base (3.7 GHz vs 3.6 GHz) and 350 MHz higher boost (4.35 GHz vs 4.0 GHz) over the 1800X, is pulling some additional performance from some micro-architecture refinements, and not just from the added clockspeed. The mobo used, an ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero motherboard, is a X370-series chipset motherboard, so while it supports the new AMD CPUs, it might not fully support all their SenseMI Gen 2 improvements. From what can be gleaned, the Ryzen 7 2700X ran at its default base frequency of 3.7GHz, and the accompanying 16GB memory ran at 2.4GHz.

Following today's surprise announcement of an Intel-AMD collaboration (of which NVIDIA seems to be the only company left in a somewhat more fragile position), there have already been a number of benchmark leaks for the new Intel + AMD devices. While Intel's original announcement was cryptic enough - to be expected, given the nature of the product and the ETA before its arrival to market - some details are already pouring out into the world wide web.

The new Intel products are expected to carry the "Kaby Lake G" codename, where the G goes hand in hand with the much increased graphics power of these solutions compared to other less exotic ones - meaning, not packing AMD Radeon graphics. For now, the known product names point to one Intel Core i7-8705G and Intel Core i7-8809G. Board names for these are 694E:C0 and 694C:C0, respectively.