Ryzen 9 3900X/3950X vs. Core i9 10900K In 380+ Benchmarks

Of course, most of you probably don't want to browse through the nearly 400 benchmarks individually... The OpenBenchmarking.org link is later in the article though for those wanting to analyze each and every individual benchmark result. But thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite we can dive into the various logical areas to offer a more concise overview how this high-end Comet Lake competition looks against Zen 2.

When it came to the AV1 video encode/decode tests with the likes of dav1dd for decode and aom-av1 and libgav1 for encode, the i9-10900K was actually the strongest CPU of the three. In this case it's due to the Comet Lake CPU performing quite well with Google's libgav1 encoder more so than AMD.

For bioinformatics workloads including Himeno, MrBayes, and HMMer, the Intel CPU came out in front thanks to its higher clock speeds.

But when pushing these CPUs with code compilation of many different code-bases, the AMD CPUs with their larger core counts easily stole the show. The code-bases built were Apache, PHP, Linux kernel, ImageMagick, GCC, GDB, LLVM, FFmpeg, MPlayer, and Build2. The only cases where the i9-10900K is competitive to the AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPUs for build performance are on code-bases with few files and thus less parallel jobs while compiling.

When looking at the breakdown of tests by all those that are C/C++ codebases like GraphicsMagick, libvpx, TSCP, FFTW, Stockfish, FLAC audio, etc, the Ryzen 9 3900X narrowly passed the Core i9 10900K while the Ryzen 9 3950X was the much stronger candidate as expected but also more expensive.

For data compression benchmarks like 7-Zip, Gzip, PBZIP2, Zstd, and XZ, the Core i9 10900K maintained a narrow lead over the 3900X/3950X due to all of these compression workloads making use of all available CPU cores.

The Core i9 10900K also came out with a strong first place finish in the cryptography benchmarks including GnuPG, BLAKE2, OpenSSL, John The Ripper, and Botan due to the higher clock frequencies.