Ubuntu 20.04 LTS A Nice Upgrade For AMD Ryzen Owners From 18.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS A Nice Upgrade For AMD Ryzen Owners From 18.04 LTS

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28960

[Danny3]

Pretty cool, but the performance would've probably been higher if they would use an up to date kernel like 5.5 or 5.6.

[Jabberwocky]

Does anyone know if the Qemu 4.1.0 QCOW2 corruption issues are solved or if an older version will be used? I have not been following the bug trackers.

[Ipkh]

You can get newer kernels with their Hardware enablement package. I run 5.3 on Xubuntu 18.04 right now.

[royce]

Yes, bionic will probably catch up in performance once its lwe catches up with focal.

[stormcrow]

I just got a new AMD Ryzen system myself. After some experience with trying to get 18.04 working on recent (contemporary with 18.04 generation) Intel based laptop I just completely jumped over 18.04 & 19.10 cuz I knew the firmware support for RX 5500XT cards was lacking, I just downloaded a daily of 20.04 and installed that instead.

Outside of a bug with Plymouth easily fixed, it was pretty nice. Admittedly, this was Kubuntu instead cuz I thoroughly detest Gnome, but it felt even more polished than Kubuntu 18.04 (even after all the necessary fixes on the laptop) as a totally anecdotal and subjective experience. I'm looking forward to the official release.

Edit to add: One thing to note that's definitely annoying, but easily worked around: Setting the monitor refresh to anything other than 60Hz causes severe screen flashing/flickering with large flashing white bands across the width of the screen on an ultrawide 2560x1080 panel. I don't know if it's a KDE problem or if it's an AMDGPU problem because I didn't try it with anything other than an AMD video card.

[Charlie68]

You can get newer kernels with their Hardware enablement package. I run 5.3 on Xubuntu 18.04 right now.

But it's not built on GCC 9.3!

[geamandura]

Why does it matter that there are Zen 2 optimizations in the new stack? Aren't the binaries in the repo built with some lowest common denominator CPU target, so that they can run on all supported CPUs? How can there be a Zen 2 optimized path in the same binary that can also run on some old Intel or old Bulldozer? I always thought I need to build packages locally with the optimizations for my own CPU if I want to enable those specific optimizations (I never did that, though).

[Snaipersky]

Why does it matter that there are Zen 2 optimizations in the new stack? Aren't the binaries in the repo built with some lowest common denominator CPU target, so that they can run on all supported CPUs? How can there be a Zen 2 optimized path in the same binary that can also run on some old Intel or old Bulldozer? I always thought I need to build packages locally with the optimizations for my own CPU if I want to enable those specific optimizations (I never did that, though).

Fat binaries which poll for supported extensions are a thing. Clear linux makes heavy use of it.

[NotMine999]

But it's not built on GCC 9.3!

Oh geez...