Intel i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: cores, MHz and benchmark

From what can be said at the internal organization level, the Intel Core 12s are much more innovative than the Ryzen 5000, while AMD’s architecture is much more conservative. However, one thing is performance and another is architecture. That’s why we’re interested in seeing how the 5950X and the i9-12900K stack up against each other.

AMD Ryzen 5950X vs i9-12900K: Specifications

First of all, we must talk about the fundamental differences between the two processors, starting with that of AMD, this one is composed of three components: on the one hand, 2 CCD chipsets which each include 8 Zen 3 cores and their first, second and third level caches. The third bullet? It integrates what is the Northbridge, which is the part of the hardware of each processor which constitutes the structure of internal and external communication.

On the other hand, the i9-12900K is a monolithic processor, as it is made of one piece, but it differs from the 5950X for a reason and that is that despite the fact that it also has 16 cores, those – these are not symmetrical, because we have 8 cores on the one hand high performance called P-Cores and on the other hand 8 cores which have higher energy efficiency, but not the same raw power that we call E-Cores.

What is the concept behind Alder Lake-S? Well, in the fact that there are parts of the code that work much better when the code is parallelized as much as possible which would benefit from a large number of E-Cores, after all their size is much larger. small. Of course, in terms of the number of cores there is no longer between the i9-12900K and the 5950X, since they both have 16.

How does this affect performance?

One of the things to take into account when comparing processors is that they won’t always be the best i.e. each architecture will perform more or less at certain times and it will be the sum total of these small parts that will make one processor more efficient than another.

Why are we saying this? If we take a benchmark, we will see that it has two variants, the first one measures performance under a single kernel, because there are parts of the programs whose kernels cannot be split between them. With the 5950X this is not a problem, but with the i9-12900K the P-Cores will be taken. Regarding the actual use of a CPU, it is a problem of fact: the operating system is responsible for distributing the tasks on the different cores and despite the recommendations of the Thread Director, a bad allocation of a process to the wrong one. kernel can mean a major performance reduction.

Either way, we’ve decided to separate the results into the different types of benchmarks so you get a feel for where each is faster in each situation. We must therefore not forget that these are specific scenarios and how to compare a vehicle in a straight line on the one hand and in a curve on the other.

Intel i9-12900K and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and benchmarks

So the first comparison is between a single P-Core and a single Zen 3 core and we can see with the new Intel architecture that it still has some advantage in the IPC. In the case of Cinebench R23 we have that the i9-12900K with 1,989 points gets 30% performance, on the other hand if we go to Geekbench 5 we can see how the Intel processor gets 2,036 points and the AMD gets 1726 points, so the difference is much narrower and 18%.

If we go to multicore tests, things change a lot and there we had a surprise which we do not know if it is due to the current situation of benchmarks, but logically due to the fact that E-Cores are less powerful and not not support HyperThreading, the result should be worse for the i9-12900K, since in the case of the 5950X, being all symmetrical and high capacity, they should get higher results.

And we say we are surprised by the fact that if we shoot again on Geekbench R23, but this time its multicore variant, we find a score of 27,344 against 27,328, which would mean that they are almost tied, which is said to be a technical tie. In contrast, on Geekbench 5, the i9-12900K scores a total of 18,259 points compared to 14,239 for the 5950X. This is a difference of 28.8%.

The i9-12900K would therefore be much more powerful according to the benchmarks, however these do not reflect a real use of processors. Users don’t run performance tests, but when it comes to running programs and what better test than video games.

How do they behave in games?

We have to admit it and absolutely nothing is happening, one of the reasons for having a powerful PC is not to make a great scientific discovery, but to see how games work. It is therefore with these that the two processors will show all their strength. And this is all due to the fact that today they are precisely the type of software that uses multicore specs the most and where programmers will have to rack their brains to find out what type of cores the game instances are sending the differences to. .

Although at the moment these optimizations in favor of Alder Lake-S are not happening, we are interested in knowing what the performance is and it can be said that they are very comparable in most games. Where AMD wins is in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla with a difference of 3 FPS, but if we talk about Forza Horizon 4 the frame rate with the i9-5950X is 234 and therefore 33 more than the Ryzen 9 5950X.

Latest conclusions

On a practical level, both processors are excellent and equal, so choosing one or the other will give you a PC with almost HEDT levels with which you can enjoy your favorite games without performance issues for many years to come.

Which of them do we stay with? We were surprised by the performance of the i9-12900K, since its configuration suggested that in the overall calculation it would have a certain disadvantage compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X and its powerful Zen 16 cores. In any case and to conclude, today Today we have the problem in increasingly poorly optimized software and not in hardware where if you choose a 5950X or an i9-12900K you are not going to go wrong.