It has been four years since AMD’s Threadripper chips have been taking the world by storm, but now Intel’s 56-core monster just crushed the top AMD chip to claim a world record. The Xeon W9-3495X scored 132,484 points in Cinebench R23’s multicore test, more than 10,000 points ahead of the previous world-record holder, the AMD Threadripper 5995WX.
While this is a great performance boost for Intel, it won’t necessarily return the company to its former dominating position in the workstation CPU market. This is because the 56-core Sapphire Rapids CPUs consume much more power than the upcoming Epyc and Threadripper Zen 4 CPUs that AMD will release in the future.
Additionally, this is an overclocking record that’s unlikely to be replicated by the general public, who don’t have access to a bespoke liquid nitrogen cooling setup like those used for these overclocking tests. The W9-3495X is a high-end workstation CPU that costs thousands of dollars to get, and even when you’re not overclocking it still draws quite a bit of power.
Despite this, it’s clear that the team behind the Xeon W9-3495X has done a superb job in overclocking the chip to make the most of its potential. In addition to the impressive overclocking results, the Xeon W9-3495X also offers unlocked multipliers for overclocking which means you can boost the speed of your system even further.
In fact, the overclocking process allows the processor to run at up to 184% faster than its standard clock frequency of 4.2 GHz. This is not a big deal for most users, but it does mean that this chip has the potential to be the fastest Xeon ever made.
What’s interesting is that the new Xeon W9-3495X topped the list of world-record holder in Cinebench R23, which isn’t necessarily a good sign for Intel as it’s likely to be beaten again by a 64-core AMD Threadripper in the near future.
However, a lot of the improvement came from the fact that this processor has hyper-threading capability, which is something that the majority of mainstream desktop chips don’t have. This is a welcome boost for gamers who need a massive number of cores to run games at full resolution and higher frame rates.
While this may be a short-lived world record for the Xeon W9-3495X, it’s a fantastic achievement that shows that Intel can compete with AMD again. It won’t be easy to reclaim the crown from AMD, however.
So, what’s the next move? We’ll keep an eye on the performance of the Xeon W9-3495X and see if it can continue to crush the competition.
The Xeon W9-3495X is one of the newest chips from Intel’s Sapphire Rapids platform. It uses a “tile” architecture where each tile contains up to 15 cores. It’s a step up from the earlier ‘Ice Lake’ chips that Intel released in 2021, and it’s designed for high-end servers and workstations.
If you’re in the market for a workstation chip, we suggest checking out the Xeon W9-3495X. It’s an incredible performer that will give you the ability to run any game at a high resolution and high frame rate.