AMD quietly annihilated Intel in a hotly contested world record — with 192 water-cooled EPYC cores hidden behind a cardboard protector

There’s a new champion in the race to get the best score on the industry standard Cinebench R23 test, with the AMD EPYC 9654 processor hitting world record of 147,668. 

This record was achieved by coupling together two AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs to achieve a 192-core configuration with 384 threads and overclocking the processors to 3.7GHz. The score is also roughly 15,000 points higher than the Intel Xeon W903495X 56-core workstation processor, the previous record-holder.

This AMD processor is among the best CPUs out there, and the result was achieved with two running in parallel with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) disabled, as well as custom liquid cooling so the cores never hit temperatures above 65-degrees C. They were also protected by cardboard, according to daveReconRF, who ran the test. This, the user said, will be replaced eventually by 3D-printed shrouds.

Why AMD stealing back the crown matters

Priced at $11,800, the AMD EPYC 9654 has a base clock speed of 2.4GHz with a max boost of 3.7Ghz. It also has an L3 Cache of 384MB and offers PCIe 5.0 connectivity with 12 memory channels and support for DDR5 RAM.

Cinebench R23, meanwhile, is a key visual rendering benchmark that divides in image into fragments each drawn on the screen sequentially. The better the processor, the quicker the image can be rendered, which corresponds with a higher score. 

AMD Threadripper CPUs have long dominated the benchmark, especially the 3995X and 5995X processors setting record scores in years gone by. But the Intel Xeon W9-3495X beat the AMD Threadripper 5995WX earlier this year, with a score of 132,484 versus 121,215.

Intel’s reign, however, as the world champion in this particular metric has been short lived, with an AMD processor once again setting a new standard in the Cinebench R23 test. There’s every chance its latest 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX chip for workstations could also stake a good claim to score highly in the Cinebench R23 test.

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