When the Intel Core i9-12900K arrived in late 2021, it was Intel’s first truly flagship CPU since its Core i9-9900K in 2018. In fact, it surpassed AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 5950X in single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, and the 12900K remains the fastest mainstream desktop CPU to date and one of the best CPUs overall.
But AMD now has its Ryzen 9 7950X. It outperforms AMD’s previous generation offering, hands down. However, even compared to Intel’s most powerful CPU to date, AMD’s latest processor shows a huge leap in performance.
Prices and availability
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
The Core i9-12900K launched in November 2021 for $640, but now often sells for between $590 and $600. Intel is also gearing up to release its Raptor Lake processors before the end of the year, which will almost certainly drive the price of the Core i9-12900K down.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X launched on September 27, 2022, and costs about $100 more than Intel’s top model. AMD has set a price tag of $700, but it’s hard to say how much the chip will sell for after the dust settles around launch. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D, for example, ended up selling for much more than its list price due to high demand.
You can find the Core i9-12900K in stock at most major retailers. The Ryzen 9 7950X is brand new, so it will probably run out of stock and be out of stock for a few weeks. However, it is difficult to say when it will be available.
Glasses
AMD
While the spec is certainly interesting to look at, it doesn’t capture the full picture of the differences and similarities between these two CPUs. The 7950X appears to be nothing more than an overclocked 5950X, but the newer chip has a completely new Zen 4 architecture. Also, while the 12900K has 16 cores just like the 7950X, they’re evenly split between performance and efficiency cores, so the 12900K isn’t a 16-core CPU in the same way that the 7950X is.
| AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | Intel Core i9-12900K | |
| cores | sixteen | 16 (8P + 8E) |
| fundamental frequency | 4.5GHz | 3.2 GHz (P core), 2.4 GHz (E core) |
| gain frequency | 5.7GHz | 4.9 GHz all cores, 5.2 GHz single core |
| L3 cache | 64MB | 30MB |
| basic strength | 170W | 125W |
| maximum gain power | 170W | 241W |
Clock speeds are also hard to compare because AMD and Intel CPUs don’t throttle in the same way. The 7950X’s boosted 5.7GHz clock speed looks amazing compared to the 5.2GHz 12900K, but this is an opportunistic clock speed that the 7950X can only achieve on a single-threaded workload. All cores run much slower, around 5.1 GHz when pushed to a demanding benchmark like Cinebench.
Another specification to examine is power. On paper, the 7950X seems to consume much less power than the 12900K, but AMD doesn’t define TDP like Intel does. Actual power consumption is TDP times 1.35, which means the 7950X can draw up to 230W, just slightly less than the 12900K. Our tests show it still draws less, around 180 W for the full platform, while the Core i9-12900K easily enters the 230 W to 240 W range.
As AMD and Intel increase power consumption to achieve higher performance, high-quality power supplies become more and more necessary to power these flagship CPUs.
Performance
The Ryzen 9 7950X is almost a year newer than the Core i9-12900K, so it should come as no surprise that the AMD part dominates performance. You can see our full results below, all of which were tested with DDR5-6000 memory and an RTX 3090 graphics card.
In direct comparison, the Ryzen 9 7950X is 36% faster than the Core i9-12900K in the Cinebench R23 multi-core test. Similarly, it outperforms the Core i9-12900K in Geekbench 5 by 30%. Those are big jumps, but they’re mostly due to the fact that the Ryzen 9 7950X has a full 16 cores. Comparing single-core results, the Ryzen 9 7950X is only 1% and 6% faster in Cinebench and Geekbench, respectively.
Other results are off the charts, including a whopping 76% increase over the Core i9-12900K in 7-Zip. However, this benchmark favors AMD processors. In agnostic apps like Handbrake, the Ryzen 9 7950X still leads, though that lead dwindles to around 20%.
| Ryzen 9 7950X | Intel Core i9-12900K | |
| Cinebench R23 (single/multiple) | 2,018 / 37,182 | 1,989 / 27,344 |
| Geekbench 5 (one/more) | 2,149 / 23,764 | 2,036 / 18,259 |
| Handbrake (seconds, lower better) | 38 seconds | 47 seconds |
| 7 zippers | 222 209 MIPS | 126 215 MIPS |
| PugetBench for Premiere Pro | 1,172 | 1,066 |
| PugetBench for Photoshop | 1,498 | 1,315 |
Of course, the difference in performance comes down to the applications you’re running, but the Ryzen 9 7950X has an advantage in just about everything, and in some cases, like 7-Zip, that advantage is too big to ignore. All told, you’re looking at about a 35% advantage with the Ryzen 9 7950X over the Core i9-12900K, which is a huge increase, even considering AMD’s part costs $100 more.
Games
While the Ryzen 9 7950X offers a big boost over the Core i9-12900K in general CPU tasks, that advantage diminishes in gaming. But make no mistake: the Ryzen 9 7950X still leads. Across six games (all at 1080p on Ultra settings), the AMD chip achieved an advantage of around 8% over the Core i9-12900K.
As always with gaming, the performance delta comes down to the game you’re playing. In GPU-intensive titles like red dead redemption 2 and cyberpunk 2077, there is not enough of a difference to matter. However, titles like hello infinity show a big jump, with the Ryzen 9 7950X beating the Core i9-12900K by 18%. Similarly, the Ryzen 9 7950X managed to achieve a 10% advantage. Force horizon 4.
| Ryzen 9 7950X | Intel Core i9-12900K | |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 19,113 | 19,396 |
| 3DMark Fire Strike | 43,386 | 39,870 |
| red dead redemption 2 | 140 frames per second | 137fps |
| Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | 115fps | 107fps |
| force horizon 4 | 257fps | 234fps |
| hello infinity | 134fps | 113fps |
| cyberpunk 2077 | 128fps | 122fps |
| far away 6 | 153fps | 141fps |
| civilization VI (spin time, less is better) | 6.1 seconds | 7.3 seconds |
Although the Core i9-12900K sometimes comes close to or even matches the Ryzen 9 7950X, Intel’s processor never took the crown in our gaming tests. The Ryzen 9 7950X wipes the floor, and sometimes by a decent margin.
Characteristics
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
The 12900K had several advantages over the Ryzen 5000: PCIe 5.0 support, DDR5 support, and superior AVX support. The Ryzen 7000 solves all of this by providing support for all of these features, and in some ways, AMD does it better than Intel.
Although both the 12900K and 7950X support PCIe 5.0, you can only use PCIe 5.0 for solid-state drives (SSDs) on current-gen Intel motherboards, while higher-end AMD motherboards will support PCIe 5.0 GPUs along with PCIe 5.0 SSD. PCIe 5.0 isn’t important for graphics cards now, but it could be in the future.
AMD also has slightly better DDR5 support, with a maximum supported speed of 5200 MHz on AMD boards, while Intel boards only go up to 4800 MHz. That said, this isn’t much of an advantage for AMD as anyone can do overclocking your RAM, be it XMP, AMP, DOCP or the new EXPO one-click overclocking feature that comes with some DDR5 kits.
Finally, AMD added support for AVX-512, which is an extended CPU instruction set that helps improve performance. Intel’s processors run native AVX-512, which is powerful but requires CPU cores to be throttled at low frequencies. AMD maintains speeds by using two 256-bit AVX modules, instead of the original 512-bit module used by Intel processors.
editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn