AMD and Intel continue to battle in wPrime 1024M world records

A new world record in wPrime 1024M was set by an Australian overclocker known as jordan.hyde99, and then snatched from under his very nose. 

Initially, the world record was set with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor, taking the previous record from the Intel Core i9-7920X. 

Overclocker, jordan.hyde99, managed to overclock his Ryzen 9 3900X to 5,625MHz using liquid nitrogen to keep it cool, before finishing the wPrime 1024M benchmark run in 35 seconds and 517 milliseconds. That's in comparison to the Intel Core i9-7920X's previous record of 35 seconds and 693 milliseconds, despite the fact the Intel chip was overclocked to 5,955MHz (also using liquid nitrogen). 

Full details of jordan.hyde99's wPrime 1024M submission are available over at Hwbot.

There's not much difference there in terms of time (we're talking less than 1 percent) but it's an interesting example of how clock speeds aren't everything when it comes to beating records. The Ryzen 9 3900X was running at a 5.8 percent lower operating clock, despite coming out faster than the Intel chip. The key difference between the two chips lie in their microarchitecture. While both processors have 12 cores and 24 threads, the AMD chip utilises AMD's Zen 2 microarchitecture with the Intel chip (predictably) uses Skylake microarchitecture. Zen 2 offers more instructions per cycle (IPC) than Skylake, and that's, ultimately, what matters when it comes to these kind of speeds. 

It was a relatively short lived world record, however. On Sunday, US overclocker, Splave, beat the record with an Intel Core i9-9920X, cutting down the time to 35 seconds and 95 milliseconds. To do so though, he had to bump up clock speeds to 6.1GHz and 5.9GHz - a fair amount higher than the AMD chip that jordan.hyde99 used. It's safe to say that AMD's microarchitecture is looking a more attractive bet to overclockers right now. Not that we expect everyone to be embracing such extreme overclocking. 

Keep your eyes peeled for someone likely to beat the record yet again soon enough.