Intel breaks Cinebench R23 world record with its super powerful Sapphire Rapids chip

AMD Threadripper has been dethroned as the world champ as Intel’s Xeon W9-3495X 56-core workstation processor absolutely crushes it in the industry-standard Cinebench R23 benchmark.

Cinebench R23, in case you haven’t used it, is a visual rendering benchmark that breaks up an image into individual segments that are each drawn to the screen sequentially. The more processing cores and threads you have available to draw those segments, the quicker the entire image can be rendered and the higher a processors resulting score will be.

For the longest time, the AMD Threadripper line of workstation chips have held the top spot, thanks to their ample number of processing cores, with the Threadripper 3995X and 5995X each featuring 64 cores and 128 threads. This normally gives the Threadripper chips a substantial advantage over Intel’s competing Xeon chips, which is something that really surprised us about these results since the Intel Xeon W9-3495X has eight fewer cores and 16 fewer threads.

Still, despite the lower number of cores and threads, the W9-3495X managed to achieve 132,484 points in Cinebench R23’s multicore performance. This is more than 10,000 points higher than the previous world-record holder, the AMD Threadripper 5995WX, which scored a 121,215.

While this is a huge win for Intel, and definitely comes with some bragging rights, these might be shortlived. As Wccftech notes, AMD’s Zen 4 Threadripper chips are on the horizon, and a 64-core/128-thread Threadripper 7995WX could very well retake the crown before the year is out.

This is great for Intel, but why should I care?

The new world record for Cinebench R23 is certainly impressive, but it’s also an incredibly niche record for most people and would be very hard to recreate as well.

Both the Intel and AMD records were set using chips that were being cooled by special liquid nitrogen setups – not something you’re likely to have handy even if you had an Intel Xeon W9-3495X, which isn’t likely since the Xeon and Threadripper line of chips are high-end workstation kit that cost many thousands of dollars.

What’s more, these records were achieved by overclocking the processor to achieve faster frequencies, in this case about 184% faster than the standard clock frequency the Xeon chip is designed to operate at.

This still matters for the average consumers though. The improvements in the Intel Xeon’s instructions-per-clock (IPC) that allowed it to break the world record aren’t going to be restricted to Intel’s Xeon lineup. And we can expect them to make their way into the manufacturer’s chips for the consumer market in the coming years, just as the improvements that AMD makes to its Zen 4 Threadrippers are going to benefit its entire processor lineup going forward.

So the further Intel and AMD can push their best processors, even if they’re for workstation PCs, anyone looking for the best gaming PC down to the best Chromebook are going to benefit from the engineering that went into producing this world record feat.