The Cinebench R23 is a visual rendering benchmark that breaks up an image into individual segments that are each drawn to the screen sequentially. This favours machines with more processing cores and threads you have available to draw those segments, because the entire image can be rendered quicker.

AMD Threadripper line of workstation chips have held the top spot, thanks to their ample number of processing cores, with the Threadripper 3995X and 5995X each featuring 64 cores and 128 threads. What is surprising about these results is that the Xeon W9-3495X has eight fewer cores and 16 fewer threads so should be slower.

Still, despite the lower number of cores and threads, the W9-3495X managed to achieve 132,484 points in Cinebench R23's multicore performance. This is more than 10,000 points higher than the previous world-record holder, the AMD Threadripper 5995WX, which scored a 121,215.

Any hopes that Intel will retain this crown will be short lived as AMD's Zen 4 Threadripper chips are coming and a 64-core/128-thread Threadripper 7995WX will clean Intel's clock by the time the year is out.

Another issue here is that both the Intel and AMD records were set using chips that were being cooled by special liquid nitrogen setups which is not something most people can be bothered. Xeon and Threadripper are high-end workstation kit that cost thousands and are even more expensive than Apple gear.