Benchmarking and frame-time capture specialist CapFrameX has posted the results of a single-threaded Cinebench R20 under the guise of one of Intel's upcoming CPUs, Rocket Lake, at 655 points, which CapFrameX says is 649 points, just slightly ahead of AMD's new wonder chip, the Ryzen 9 5950X, which has a point.

But there's a catch: the Rocket Lake chip reportedly requires a clock speed of 5.5 GHz to achieve this score. The AMD Radeon R9 5950X has a maximum boost clock speed of just 4.9 GHz, but in real-world testing, 5 GHz slightly above 5GHz. If the benchmark results and clock speeds are accurate, it shows just how far Intel is willing to go to reclaim the gaming performance crown.

While Cinebench R20 is obviously not a gaming benchmark, its single-threaded execution time is a fairly reliable indication of CPU performance per core. Furthermore, relatively few games can scale much beyond the eight cores that the higher-end Rocket Lake chips, which are expected to be available when they are launched early next year. That is why Intel's 10-core i9-10900K is not competitive with games powered by 12- or 16-core Ryzen processors.

Taken together, this means that Intel could take back the gaming crown from AMD with the arrival of Rocket Lake early next year. Or at the very least, it could pull apart what is currently a very close race between Intel's 10th generation CPUs and AMD's new Ryzen 5000 chips.

None of this is a big surprise, of course. Overall, there is virtually nothing between Intel and AMD when it comes to gaming performance. Rocket Lake, on the other hand, will feature a new 14nm backported architecture based on the Sunny Cove cores found in Intel's 10th generation 10nm laptop chips.

Independent testing shows that Sunny Cove, as seen in the Core i9 10900K and other 10th generation desktop Core families, is visibly more advanced per clock than the Skylake-based cores found in Intel's 14nm Comet Lake chips. performance, as seen in the i9 10900K and other 10th generation desktop Core family members.

The backport to 14nm may lose some of Sunny Cove's advantage, but it should still be enough of an advance in IPC that if Intel's 14nm chips can achieve the high clock speeds they are characterized by, they should be able to achieve single-threaded performance that AMD's Ryzen 5000 should surpass it. In other words, the 5.5GHz Rocket Lake will likely take the gaming crown.

But at a ...... cost." Rumors are circulating about the power implications of backporting large CPU cores originally designed for 10nm to the legacy 14nm node. Fully clocked up to 5.5GHz, the power consumption implications are quite frightening. In fact, it is believed that this very power consumption conundrum is the reason why Rocket Lake is only being expanded to 8 cores, a step back from the 10-core Core i7-10900K. The backported Sunny Cove-based cores simply consume too much power.

Still, single-threading and gaming performance are the only prizes to be gained as Intel struggles to move beyond 14nm on the desktop, as AMD holds a commanding advantage in multicore. At least until Intel resolves its 10nm woes, and we may have to wait for Intel's 7nm node, it will be some time before Chipzilla has any hope of reclaiming the overall performance crown.