Intel Core i9 7900X Linux Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 27 June 2017 at 08:00 PM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 31 Comments.

Since the Intel Core-X Series were announced last month at Computex, I've been excited to see how well this high-end processor will perform under Linux... Linux enthusiasts have plenty of highly-threaded workloads such as compiling the Linux kernel, among other packages, and thus have been very excited by the potential of the Core i9 7900X with its ten cores plus Hyper Threading and sporting a 13.75MB cache. With finally having an X299 motherboard ready, here are my initial Ubuntu Linux benchmarks for the i9-7900X.

Apologies for the delay in getting the Core-X Series benchmarks out as only received the review samples on the embargo lift date and then a snag in getting X299 motherboards early. But this morning the MSI X299 SLI PLUS arrived and thus I've been off to the races in benchmarking the i9-7900X and the i7-7740X. This is just the first of many interesting Linux testing articles to come with these new Intel CPUs.

For those not yet familiar with the high-end Core i9 7900X, it features ten physical cores plus Hyper Threading to yield 20 logical cores... This will be going up against AMD's soon-to-release ThreadRipper processors. These ten physical cores are clocked at 3.3GHz, sport a 4.3GHz turbo frequency, and have a 4.5GHz Turbo Boost Max 3.0 (TBM3) frequency. There's also a 13.75MB L3 cache available to these cores. This Skylake-X CPU holds a lot of potential both as a 140 Watt TDP. On the memory front, the Core i9 7900X supports four channels of DDR4-2666MHz memory.

Another exciting fact about the Core i9 7900X is that it supports AVX-512! I am quite excited to run some AVX-512 compiler/Linux benchmarks in the days ahead. There will be articles simply devoted to that as well among other interesting Core-X benchmarks.

Well, let's move on to these initial Linux benchmarks of the Core i9 7900X under Linux. All tests were done on Ubuntu 17.04 with the Linux 4.12 Git kernel. Like the Intel Core i7 7740X on Linux, the i9-7900X hasn't exhibited any problems yet. Additionally, unlike AMD Ryzen CPUs, thermal monitoring of the CPU via the coretemp driver is working on Linux 4.12. Though a bit odd about the i9-7900X temperature exposure is showing 13 cores, or at least 13 different temperature sensors. Comparison systems included:

- AMD FX-8350
- AMD Ryzen 7 1700
- AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
- Intel Core i5 7600K
- Intel Core i7 4790K
- Intel Core i7 4960X
- Intel Core i7 5775C
- Intel Core i7 5960X
- Intel Core i7 6800K
- Intel Core i7 7700K
- Intel Core i7 7740X
- Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5
- Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3
- Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3

All of these systems were running Ubuntu 17.04 with the Linux 4.12 kernel. Due to differences in the storage and graphics cards, the tests in this article are focused solely on the CPU performance. Linux gaming tests and more are obviously still on the way along with performance-per-Watt metrics and more. The Intel Core i9 7900X was tested today with the MSI X299 SLI PLUS motherboard, 4 x 4GB Corsair DDR4-3000MHz memory, Corsair Force MP500 240GB NVMe SSD, Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury, and EVGA NEX 750G power supply.

In this article are just our raw CPU focused Linux performance benchmarks while performance-per-Watt, Linux gaming comparison, and other tests are forthcoming. Thanks for your understanding due to the delay in getting the necessary hardware. If you enjoy all of our Linux benchmarks, consider showing your support by subscribing to Phoronix Premium.


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