Leaked AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Scores Edge Out Core i9-9900K Single-Threaded, Retail Packaging Breaks Cover

AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen architecture deep dive chip
AMD’s Ryzen 3000 family of Zen 2 processors are roughly a week away from launch, and enthusiasts are chomping at the bit to see if performance lives up to expectations. Luckily, leaked benchmarks for the family have been promising and the latest shows some significant gains in one area where Intel has traditionally held the upper hand: single-threaded performance. 

AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600 is supposed to be a midrange processor, but its single-core performance is already flagship worthy. Although early Ryzen 3000 benchmarks that we’ve seen have centered around Geekbench, this new result is from a Passmark CPUMark single-thread test. In this particular test, the processor achieved 2979 versus a score of 2899 for the Intel Core i9-9900K. It’s a small advantage points wise, but a huge leap for traditional underdog AMD. 

passmark cpumark zen2

Intel regains the lead on overall performance, scoring 20,209 to AMD’s 20,134. But considering the AMD chip’s price of $199 compared to $488 for the Core i9-9900K, it’s a commendable performance showing. This pricing advantage is something that Intel warned about in an internal memo, in which Intel exec Steve Collins wrote:

AMD made improvements in their 2nd generation Zen core and their disaggregated chiplet-based architecture scales cores efficiently. Therefore, on workloads that are heavily threaded, including heavy content creation and most server workloads, they'll get great performance results. And on price, we expect their pricing to be significantly below ours. So they'll likely get good performance-per-dollar. That's what they're going to compete on, and that's the risk to Intel.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is a 6-Core/12-thread processor with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.2GHz. It will be paired with motherboards running AMD’s new X570 chipset which supports the new PCIe 4.0 interface. 

ryzen9 box

In other Ryzen 3000 news, the first retail box shot has allegedly leaked. This design is reportedly for the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 9 3950X processors. It will include a Wraith Prism RGB cooler according to Guru3D.