Intel Still Has The Upperhand On BSD Support - Core i9 10980XE Benchmarks With DragonFlyBSD + FreeBSD

While the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is delivering better raw Linux performance in a far majority of workloads compared to the Intel Core i9 10980XE, one of the areas where the Cascadelake-X platform and Intel CPUs still have an advantage is when it comes to the BSD support. Intel actively supports the BSDs more than AMD and in turn leads to the latest hardware generally working out fine on the latest BSDs. Here are some DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD tests against Linux with the i9-10980XE.

In the case of the Threadripper 3970X on the BSDs, it works fine with FreeBSD 12.1 but failed with DragonFlyBSD. Generally with new AMD platforms the latest FreeBSD releases stand good chances of working out-of-the-box but routinely are new motherboards/chipsets that play quirky with FreeBSD or lack various working driver support. On the DragonFlyBSD side the support generally isn't there at-launch due to whatever bugs for a given launch, but are generally addressed with time, especially with DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon being a big Ryzen/Threadripper fan and has routinely expressed his fondness for their recent platforms. But with AMD not dedicating much in the way of visible resource helping the BSDs, new Intel hardware support is usually better positioned to work on the BSDs at launch. It's not that no big AMD customers use BSDs but in cases like Netflix, they optimized FreeBSD themselves.

In the case of the Core i9 10980XE with the new GIGABYTE X299X DESIGNARE 10G motherboard, it was working out-of-the-box on both FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD. It's much more rare finding Intel hardware issues at launch with those and other BSDs. Beyond just ensuring their new chipsets and processors work on the BSDs, Intel has also been making other investments into FreeBSD with supporting vTune, better power management, persistent memory handling, and also evaluating other upstream improvements based upon customer requests.

Long story short, the Intel Core i9 10980XE with GIGABYTE X299X DESIGNARE 10G motherboard were working well out-of-the-box on both FreeBSD 12.1 and DragonFlyBSDS tested both with its stable 5.6.2 release and 5.7 daily development images. It was working out well on those tested BSDs and for your viewing pleasure are some results against CentOS 7/8, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 31, Manjaro 18.1.4, Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and Debian 10.2. All of these Linux and BSD benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite.