AMD Ryzen 8950X CPU leak suggests slower clocks, and slower performance than previous leakage

A leaked benchmark of AMD's next-gen desktop flagship, theoretically the Ryzen 8950X processor, has popped up online.

The leak comes from YouTuber RedGamingTech (RGT), who touches more broadly on Zen 5 desktop, too, noting that clock speeds will be dialed back with the next-gen CPUs, and AMD is focusing on beefing up IPC.

As for the leak itself, it's of an engineering sample (obviously) of the 8950X which has been run through its paces on Cinebench 2024.

The Ryzen 8950X purportedly scored around 2,400 for multi-core performance (the results were rounded to protect the source), and about 140 for single-core.

We don't get any info on the configuration of the PC used, just the raw result from Cinebench (and we don't know if PBO was employed, for example). So, add even more salt here above and beyond the quantity required because this is a leak.

Compared to the current-gen Ryzen 7950X, then, the 8950X is around 10% to 12% faster, which is a less impressive generation-on-generation gain than RGT previously leaked with Cinebench R23.

As RGT observes, it's possible some apps may not do so well in terms of being bandwidth throttled, and that could be what we're seeing with the Cinebench 2024 scores - or these may be correct, and the previous R23 leak is the errant one.

At any rate, we shouldn't read too much into a single leaked benchmark for obvious reasons.

What's interesting, though, is that Moore's Law is Dead, another YouTube leaker you're no doubt familiar with, pinned a 10% to 15% gain on Zen 5 - so that does seem to align with this new leak. That said, Moore's Law is Dead does acknowledge gains of 20% are feasible, still, and there's wiggle room for beefier Ryzen 8000 chips to emerge in that respect.

RGT makes it clear that right now, the Ryzen 8950X appears to offer somewhat widely varied results based on different benchmarks and apps - and we should underline that these are still test chips anyway (in unknown PC configurations, with unknown parameters).

If your main concern is gaming, RGT makes further revelations on this front specifically.

The leaker reckons that the standard Zen 5 processors (8950X and downwards) will be faster for gaming than X3D CPUs from Zen 4. So, we can imagine the leap that'll be made by 3D V-Cache toting Zen 5 CPUs when they emerge later on.

As a final note, we mentioned clock speed regression for Zen 5, and we're told by RGT to expect drops of between 150MHz to 300MHz, with the exact amounts obviously varying between different chips. But just to reiterate that the focus for AMD here is IPC gains (and, of course, with lower clocks will come a taming of power usage, too).

More efficient Ryzen desktop CPUs could be another worry for Intel, then, especially as Team Blue's Raptor Lake Refresh, which has just landed, receiving a rather mixed reception, shall we say (we gave a big thumbs-up to the 14900K).