New information about Intel's new Sunny Cove architecture has leaked out, showing some impressive performance capabilities. An engineering sample that reportedly rests at 3.6GHz, was almost as capable as a 4.7GHz AMD Ryzen 3800x at 4.7GHz, and in excess of a Core i9 9900KS running at 5GHz.
These performance numbers aren't proven accurate at this time, but they do show a tantalising glimpse of what Intel might be able to do if it can ever bring its Ice Lake architecture to desktops. We don't expect that to happen until at least 2021, however, so expect big gains to come from the AMD front too before we get there.
Those Sunny Cove chips also seem quite limited on the core front, suggesting that Intel is putting a lot of its die shrink performance enhancements at boosting single threaded performance with the new architecture, rather than offering more cores. That could backfire if AMD continues to push core counts in the next couple of years.
What's also of note with these new leaked stats, though, is that Intel's 14nm Comet Lake chips, which are slated for a second half of 2020 launch, are much more typical and competitive. An eight core Cometlake CPU rated at 5.2GHz manages to retain similar performance to a 9700K running at 5.3GHz, suggesting a small bump in performance over the Coffee Lake refresh generation. It also stays ahead of AMD's new Ryzen 3000 CPUs, but only by a small margin and at much higher clock speeds, suggesting that even if Intel does come back with a 10nm bang in 2022, it has a long way to go before it can get back up to speed with AMD's best in terms of clock for clock performance.
As WCCFTech suggests, this all means quite exciting things for the next few years of CPU design, but AMD looks set to stay ahead for now.
