Intel’s 11th gen flagship processor spotted beating AMD’s finest in leaked benchmarks

Aside from being the year in which the COVID-19 epidemic broke out, 2020 will also be remembered by fans of PC technology as the year in which AMD finally managed to overtake Intel.

This is because technology company AMD released its new Ryzen 5000 processors this year, and has the best-performing gaming processor in the world right now, the Ryzen 9 5950X. This processor took the crown from the Core i9-10900K, with Intel’s 10-core monster now being relegated to second place in the gaming arena (the Ryzen 9 5950X by the way, sports a massive 16 cores).

Intel, though, is now looking to fight back, and is prepping its new 11th generation “Rocket Lake” processors for release, something which is rumored to be happening early next year.

And benchmark results which leaked on Twitter suggest that Intel could be making a comeback with its 11th gen CPUs, with the Santa Clara company recapturing the gaming crown from AMD as was recently reported on TechRadar.

Actually, a leaked Ashes of the Singularity benchmark shows Intel’s Core i9-11900K beating AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X in the test. This was run using the “Crazy_1080p” preset and Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API, which game creators use to program games that run on Windows 10.

In this test, the i9-11900K manages 63 fps (frames per second), while the Ryzen 9 5950X does 57 fps. This means that Intel’s processor outperforms AMD’s by about 11 %, which is not bad at all taking into account that the i9-11900K is an 8-core processor, while the Ryzen 9 5950X sports 16 cores as previously stated.

Bear in mind, though, that while both processors were running on a PC equipped with a Nvidia GeForce 2080 Ti graphics card, Intel’s processor had 32 GB of memory available, while AMD’s was running on a machine with only 16 GB of RAM, something which is unlikely to have had much impact on the results as TechRadar points out. The test was run at 1080p instead of 4K too, something which makes sense when comparing processors as results become more dependent on the graphics card at higher resolutions.

Also, this result contradicts an earlier leak which showed AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X ahead of Intel’s i9-11900K in the same Ashes of Singularity benchmark, but with the test being run with a GeForce RTX 3080 card instead. Do note, though, that the i9-11900K isn’t out yet, and hasn’t been announced by Intel either, and that the final performance of the chip could be higher than what is being seen in the leaked benchmarks (which like all leaks of this kind must be taken with a pinch of salt).

Nonetheless, the i9-11900K edging out the Ryzen 9 5050X in one benchmark is still good for Intel, given the bad news that have come the company’s way in 2020 so far. After Apple’s announcement that it was ditching Intel, and that it would be making its own processors for its MacBook computers, and Microsoft’s recent statement that it would be making its own server processors, Intel really needs to reclaim the performance crown from AMD.

Intel being behind AMD is not something new though: it already happened back in the days of AMD’s dual core Athlon 64 X2 processor. AMD was ahead for a short time back in 2005, only for Intel to refine its processes and hit back with a vengeance with its then new Core 2 Duo processors, a trick the Santa Clara company will have to pull of again if it wants to maintain its dominance of the market in the long run.

The upcoming Core i9-11900K is looking promising, though, even if Intel’s 11th gen will be something of a “middle step” until the company can get its new manufacturing processes online, and maybe deliver something truly special with the 12th generation (codenamed “Alder Lake”), something to look forward to no doubt.

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