The baby of the 12th Gen range, the Celeron G6900 can match the i9 10900K in single threaded performance

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The pawn takes the king.

Reverse side of an Intel LGA 1700CPU
(Image credit: Intel)

It’s always worth scouring Geekbench for leaks of new or upcoming hardware as testers sometimes forget that Geekbench uploads scores to a leaderboard. The just launched Intel Celeron G6900 is the baby of the 12th Gen range, but such are the improvements on offer from the Golden Cove P cores, this little CPU is capable of matching the mighty Core i9 10900K in single threaded performance, albeit with some tweaking.

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The Celeron G6900 is a dual core processor with just two threads, a 3.4GHz clock, 4MB of L3 cache and a 46W TDP. It’s definitely cheap in spec and price at just $59 (£55, $109 AU). Some would say that a CPU with two threads shouldn’t exist in 2021, and we’d agree mostly, but then again, it's under $60 which is hard to argue with.

A keen eyed tweeter, Benchleaks spotted the Geekbench entries (via wccftech). According to the results, the Celeron G6900 was paired with an ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard and 16GB of DDR4 memory. It is important to note that the CPU was apparently clocked at 4.4 GHz, well above the stock 3.4 GHz which is likely a result of Asrock’s Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology. 

The entries show the G6900 scoring around 1400 points in the single-core tests. Compare this to the Core i9-10900K which delivers an essentially identical score in the same test. It’s rather stunning that an entry level Celeron G6900 can match the flagship processor from just two generations back.  To put it another way, a 4.4 GHz Golden Cove core, even with a small cache is able to match the best Comet Lake (or any Skylake) core. 

Of course, the G6900 with its two threads is not in the same ballpark, league or sport as the twenty threads offered by the 10900K, so a G6900 isn’t going to be a great choice for your home video encoding tasks. 

Even with its excellent ‘overclocked’ single threaded performance, the G6900 isn’t going to end up in many gaming rigs, unless minesweeper is your idea of AAA gaming. It’s very much entry level, and it's destined to find its way into basic office or internet machines. Don’t expect to see many reviews of it. What it does show is that 12th Gen CPUs are very strong, all the way from the entry level Celeron G6900 up to the king of gaming, the i9 12900K.

Chris Szewczyk
Chris Szewczyk
Hardware Writer

Chris' gaming experiences go back to the mid-nineties when he conned his parents into buying an 'educational PC' that was conveniently overpowered to play Doom and Tie Fighter. He developed a love of extreme overclocking that destroyed his savings despite the cheaper hardware on offer via his job at a PC store. To afford more LN2 he began moonlighting as a reviewer for VR-Zone before jumping the fence to work for MSI Australia. Since then, he's gone back to journalism, enthusiastically reviewing the latest and greatest components for PC & Tech Authority, PC Powerplay and currently Australian Personal Computer magazine and PC Gamer. Chris still puts far too many hours into Borderlands 3, always striving to become a more efficient killer.