Intel's Hybrid architecture has a key payoff, and that's with multi-threaded application performance. The E-cores may be tiny, but offer impressive performance, and when deployed in large-enough numbers, have an enormous impact on the multi-threaded performance. The 8P+16E Core i9-13900K beating the Ryzen 9 7950X; and more importantly, the 6P+8E Core i5-13600K beating the Ryzen 7 7700X, is forcing AMD to reconsider CPU core-counts across its product-stack. The first sign of this is the discovery of a Geekbench submission, where the popular benchmark detects the unreleased Ryzen 7 7800X as a 10-core/20-thread processor.

Given that AMD doesn't have 10-core "Zen 4" CCDs, the 7800X is a dual-CCD chip, like the Ryzen 9 7900X. It has two CCDs with 5 cores, each; and more importantly, 32 MB of L3 cache, each. The engineering sample of this processor is configured with a base frequency of 4.50 GHz, and 5.40 GHz boost. There's no word on availability, but given that the Core i7-13700K crushes the Ryzen 7 7700X in both gaming and multi-threaded performance from the reviews we've seen (expect our review soon); AMD would likely replace the 7700X at its $399 price-point with the new 10-core 7800X, and lower the 7700X to a price-point closer to that of the i5-13600K. There's another equally interesting processor that surfaced on Geekbench—the Ryzen 3 7300X.