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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance Review

www.phoronix.com AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance Review
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance Review

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

I have been very much enjoying my time testing out AMD's Zen 5 wares from the Ryzen AI 300 series to the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X were great for whetting my appetite while awaiting the Ryzen 9 9900 series. I had been very much enjoying them to the extent I was rather surprised myself last week when hearing of some reviewers not finding much excitement out of these new Zen 5 processors but typically those just looking at Windows gaming performance or running only a few canned/synthetic benchmarks. Following the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Linux testing when the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X arrived, they were put immediately to my gauntlet of hundreds of Linux benchmarks and indeed living up to expectations.

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  • In total I ran nearly 400 benchmarks across all the CPUs. When taking the geometric mean of all the raw performance results, the Ryzen 9 9950X came out to being 17.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile was 21.5% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X across this wide mix of workloads. The Ryzen 9 9950X was 33% faster than the Intel Core i9 14900K performance overall and even the Ryzen 9 9900X was 18% faster than the Core i9 14900K. For those still on AM4, the Ryzen 9 9950X was delivering 1.87x the performance of the Ryzen 9 5950X processor. These are some great gains found with the Ryzen 9 9900 series.

    With the Intel Core benchmarks it's also worth mentioning that the testing was prior to the newly-released Intel 0x129 microcode update and I'll have more benchmarks with that change soon. As of writing the Core i9 14900K is retailing for around $550 USD while the Ryzen 9 9950X is set to retail for around 18% more but delivering 33% greater performance on a geo mean basis overall. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile at $499 is around $50 less than the i9-14900K while overall delivering 18% better performance. A slam dunk in performance, value, and power efficiency with the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series compared to the competition.

    Somehow I feel all those negative reviews from techtubers aren't really adequate.

  • Still not sure whether I will upgrade to 9900x or 9700x from my 3700x

    I'm recently:

    • Doing a lot of av1 software encoding at low presets
    • Not trusting yet of rocm future

    So going harder on the stronger CPU rather than an expensive the GPU seems to be the answer for me. If I gamble on proper rocm support for some AI workloads and fail at least I could run some casual stuff using the CPU device.