AMD Ryzen users who are running Linux-based operating systems have a lot to be happy about today. That's because the performance of the platform seems to have improved by leaps and bounds over the years according to the latest testing by Phoronix. The test was conducted using a Ryzen Threadripper 3990X HEDT (high end desktop) processor, which is built on the Zen 2 architecture. The CPU is a powerful 64 core, 128 thread part that was released in 2020. For the graphics, a Radeon RX 5700 XT, based on RDNA 1, was used. For test OS, Ubuntu 23.04 with Linux kernel version 6.2 was used.
Moving on to the results themselves, the biggest, most spectacular gains are seen in the Vulkan benchmarks. If one had to guess, it seems like excellent optimization work has been done inside Vulkan and the AMD drivers such that the API has been able to better utilize more cores and threads. Compared to back in 2020, when the CPU was first released, there is up to an astonishing 444.7% improvement in the AlexNet Vulkan universal neural network inference framework (ncnn) benchmark. Meanwhile, the other ncnn tests also show close to 175% improvement or nearly three times better performance.
The full detailed chart showing the performance gains in 2023 versus 2020 are given below (you'll need to zoom in):
A total of 135 tests were run. In terms of geometric mean across all the results, the new Linux PC was found to be almost 15% faster, which is quite a lot considering there were so many tests.
You can find the full results with more details over on Phoronix's website.
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