AMD's recently unveiled Ryzen 9 9950X is an absolute stunner of a CPU. Based on the Zen 5 architecture, the chip sports 16 cores and 32 threads with a base clock of 4.3 GHz and a single-core boost clock of 5.7 GHz. Thanks to igor_kravinsky of AnandTech forums, it seems we now have some preliminary data that can be utilized to gauge how performant the Granite Ridge CPU will actually be.

According to Ivor, he gained access to the following performance figures from a source who had access to an engineering sample of the CPU, and gave him permission to share the results. The testing involved AIDA64's AES, FP32 (single precision), and FP64 (double precision) benchmarks. For comparison, the Ryzen 9 7950X's and Intel i9-13900K's results were also included, and the outcomes are nothing short of astonishing.

AES : 9950X - 746,991 MB/s, 7950X - 380,473 MB/s, 13900K - 287,587 MB/s

FP32: 9950X - 110,444 KRay/s, 7950X - 63,132 KRay/s, 13900K - 34,969 KRay/s

FP64: 9950X - 59,582 KRay/s, 7950X - 33,612 KRay/s, 13900K - 19,060 KRay/s

The Ryzen 9 9950X almost doubles the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X(currently $486 on Amazon) in these tests, while effortlessly trouncing the 13900K. However, readers are requested to be mindful of the fact that the CPU tested was, after all, an engineering sample, so the final product's performance may vary. Moreover, these gains might not be reflected in real-life usage, since the AES and floating point tests are mostly applicable for very specific, targeted workloads. Synthetic benchmarks are not always indicative of real-world or gaming performance, so it's best to wait for more mainstream testing before jumping to conclusions.