AMD Phenom 9500 Linux Performance

Prior to installing the AMD Phenom 9500 processor, the MA790FX-DS5 test system was using an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor and was freshly formatted with Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" and deploying the Linux 2.6.22 kernel. However, upon installing the AMD Phenom processor the results weren't as expected... The system had a kernel panic. This certainly wasn't what we were expecting, but upon reinstalling Ubuntu, the kernel had calmly started.

In addition to the kernel panic, we had also experienced a myriad of other issues when using Linux. These problems ranged from an occasional stability hiccup to Ubuntu's usplash hanging during the boot process and it's logo going psychedelic. We had experienced such issues while running at its default settings and the latest motherboard BIOS, and the issues had only intensified when overclocking. Interestingly, none of these problems were experienced when using the same motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor.

As we mentioned in our 790FX preview article, AMD's OverDrive software for easy tweaking/overclocking currently isn't available for Linux. Using the MA790FX-DS5 F3 BIOS from late December (with the TLB fix), we were able to easily overclock the Phenom 9500 to 2.53GHz. The remainder of the system hardware had consisted of a Corsair TX750W power supply, Seagate SATA 300GB hard drive, and 2GB of OCZ Reaper HPC PC2-8500 memory.

For comparing the Phenom Linux performance, we had re-benchmarked the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, which comes similarly clocked at 2.2GHz, and also when it was overclocked to 2.70GHz. The Athlon 64 X2 was tested on the same MA790FX-DS5 system. On the Intel side, we had used their X38 Chipset found on the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, while the rest of the hardware components remained the same. The Core 2 Duo E6400 was tested when running at 2.13GHz and overclocked to 2.52GHz. In this article we are just comparing these two dual-core processors to AMD's first quad-core processor, but once operations return to normal after CES we will be delivering more quad-core Linux benchmarks.

On the software side, we were running Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel and X server 1.3. With the Radeon HD 3870 we were running the Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver.

On the next page is our dump of /proc/cpuinfo for the AMD Phenom 9500.