Benchmark results for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC appeared on Geekbench Browser early yesterday morning, under the designation Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen. This chipset is tipped to be a successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which was launched at the end of 2021 as the world's first 5 nm Arm-based SoC for Windows laptops. A tipster on Twitter has highlighted the very underwhelming results posted by the next gen chipset, and these figures would indicate that an engineering sample was the test subject, not final silicon. The 8-core Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is shown to outperform its supposed successor, and the clock frequencies for the latter appear to be lower than anticipated.

The Geekbench 5 database entry for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 also reveals details about its specifications - a 12-core configuration that is split into eight performance cores and four power-efficiency ones. The base core frequency is listed as being 2.38 GHz, and the benchmark was completed under a Balanced Power plan in Windows 11 Home Insider Preview. 16 GB of RAM was used in the test kit, although earlier leaks have indicated that the chipset can support up to a maximum of 64 GB LPDDR5 RAM.

3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame is where overclockers submit their best hardware benchmark trials and try to beat the very best. For years, one record managed to hold, and today it just got defeated. According to an extreme overclocker called "biso biso" from South Korea and a part of the EVGA OC team, the top spot now belongs to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The previous 3DMark Fire Strike world record was set on April 22nd in 2020, when Vince Lucido, also known as K|NGP|N, set a record with four-way SLI of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs. However, that record is old news since January 27th, when biso biso set the history with AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU.

The overclocker scored 62389 points, just 1,183 more from the previous record. He pushed the Navi 21 XTX silicon that powers the Radeon RX 6900 XT card to an impressive 3,147 MHz. Paired with a GPU memory clock of 2370 MHz, the GPU was probably LN2 cooled to achieve these results. The overclocker used EVGA's Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard with Intel Core i9-12900K processor as a platform of choice to achieve this record. You can check it out on the 3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame website to see yourself.

Intel's upcoming Alder Lake-S lineup of processors is shaping up to be a rather good generational improvement. With wonders of the Intel 7 process, previously called 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin (10ESF), the processor lineup will deliver new hybrid technology, mixing new big and small cores into one package. Today, some new CPU-Z validation tests have shown up for the Intel Core i5-12600K CPU, which directly replaces the previous Core i5-11600K Rocket Lake model. With six high-performance Golden Cove and four efficient Gracemont cores, the Core i5-12600K CPU is a ten-core design with 16 threads. And compared to the 6C/12T i5-12600K CPU, the performance is much higher.

According to CPU-Z scores, the new Alder Lake processor scored 7220 and 7156 points for a multi-threaded benchmark in two tests. Compare this to the previous-generation model, which scores 4731 points, and the new chip is almost 50% faster. According to CPU-Z, the new CPU achieved this while running at a boost frequency of 4.5 GHz to 4.7 GHz.

Intel is still in the work of testing and certification for their more complex graphics products based on their Xe microarchitectures, and that means that some tests are being done in well-known benchmarking platforms. Case in point, an Intel Xe GPU with a reported 128 EUs (1024 shading units), 3 GB of memory, and a clockspeed of 1.4 GHz ran through Geekbench, where it scored an... interesting 9,311 points in the OpenCL test.

This is more likely than not an engineering sample, considering that Intel's Iris Xe MAX wrapped in its Tiger Lake package can score up to 23,000 points. It is currently unclear if this particular Xe manifestation is running on Intel's Xe-LP or Xe-HPG architecture. This might be Intel's DG-2 product, which offers higher performance than their DG-1 discrete graphics card that is only available for system integrators.