IN MID-MARCH, the PC world got a new CPU king with the release of the Intel Core i9-14900KS, touted as the fastest processor in history. This was in light of a dedicated team of enthusiasts at Asus using a combination of liquid helium and elbow grease to overclock the 24-core chip to 9,117 MHz on a single P-core.
It was only a matter of time before this 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chip met its match. According to AnandTech forum member, Igor Kavinski, this has already happened. On July 18, he began publishing the benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core ‘Zen 5’ Desktop CPU at its maximum power potential.
Kavinski has form, having listed how the 16-core flagship scales at various TDP limits in the Blender and Cinebench benchmarks. For instance, when supplied with 160W of power, the 9950X reached the Cinebench R23 score of 48,011 for multithreaded performance.