Ryzen, Windows 10 & Laptop Survey Piqued Linux Users In July

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 August 2017 at 12:00 AM EDT. Add A Comment
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AMD Ryzen continued to be a very popular area of interest by Phoronix readers as did our Linux vs. Windows benchmarks, among other hardware tests in July. Last month on Phoronix your's truly authored 23 featured articles/reviews and 290 news articles.

Of the average of ten new Phoronix articles each and every day, there was a lot of interesting content in July as listed below with the most-viewed stories and news items. As a quick reminder, don't forget to stay up to date with our news via Facebook and Twitter. This site can only continue to function by readers viewing this site without ad-blockers and/or joining Phoronix Premium to access this site ad-free and with multi-page articles on a single page.

Looking ahead to August will be Radeon RX Vega Linux benchmarks once I manage to get ahold of a card, more Ryzen benchmarks (including Ryzen 3), various Linux GPU comparisons, more Mesa 17.3-dev and Linux 4.13 benchmarks, and much more. Premium members also have priority access to me for requesting new benchmarks and articles.

The most popular news for July 2017 on Phoronix included:

Benchmarks Of PHP 7.2 Beta: PHP Is Still Getting Faster
PHP 7.2 Beta 1 was released yesterday as the next step towards this next refinement to PHP7 that is expected to be officially released in November. I couldn't help but to run some initial benchmarks.

Glibc Enables A Per-Thread Cache For Malloc - Big Performance Win
Glibc has added a per-thread cache to malloc and enabled it by default.

Some Of What You Can Look Forward To With Linux 4.13
With Linux 4.12 likely coming out this weekend, here's a look at some of the features you will likely be able to find within Linux 4.13.

I Had A Tough Time Deciding What GPU To Use On My Main Fedora Linux Workstation
This week I've been working on transitioning my main production workstation to Fedora 26, but I had a really tough time this cycle deciding which graphics card to use, even with having dozens at my disposal.

Qt QML Is Better Than HTML5 For User Interfaces?
Get the popcorn ready as this should be an interesting discussion item: is using Qt QML better than HTML5 when designing user-interfaces?

Steam Linux Usage Saw A Notable Decline For June 2017
Valve's monthly Steam Survey metrics show a relatively large decline in the Linux market-share for the past month.

The Kernel Put On Some Weight With Linux 4.13
Here are some numbers about how much weight the kernel gained during the Linux 4.13 merge window that closed last week.

Linux 4.12 Kernel Released
The Linux 4.12 kernel has now been officially released.

ZFS On Linux 0.7 Released With New Features
A new release of ZOL is available for running the ZFS file-system natively on Linux. This ZFS On Linux v0.7 update does bring a number of new features.

Changes That You Won't Find In Linux 4.13
The Linux 4.13 merge window is nearing the end and while there is a lot of new features/changes, there is some functionality that you won't find in this next version of the upstream Linux kernel.

While the most popular featured articles included:

2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results
Following the two week survey process, here are the results from our inaugural Linux Laptop Survey. There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings. There may be some additional follow-up articles in the days/weeks ahead when sifting through more of the data.

Linux vs. BSD CPU Scaling Up To 20 Threads On The Core i9 7900X
With Intel's recently-launched Core i9 7900X I have carried out some interesting BSD vs. Linux benchmarks when testing out various distributions and comparing each of them at 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 20 threads on this $999+ USD processor.

Ryzen Compiler Performance: Clang 4/5 vs. GCC 6/7/8 Benchmarks
A few days back I posted some fresh AMD Ryzen compiler benchmarks of LLVM Clang now that it has its new Znver1 scheduler model, which helps out the performance of Ryzen on Linux with some of the generated binaries tested. But it was found still that Haswell-tuned binaries are sometimes still faster on Ryzen than the Zen "znver1" tuning itself. For continuing our fresh compiler benchmarks from AMD's new Ryzen platform, here are the latest GCC numbers.

AMD Ryzen 5 1400 Linux Benchmarks: 27-Way CPU Comparison On Ubuntu
If you are looking to get an AMD Zen CPU on a budget, the cheapest Ryzen 5 CPU in the current line-up is the 1400 model, which for $160 USD will get you a quad-core processor plus Hyper Threading and clocks up to 3.4GHz. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 on Ubuntu 17.04 compared to various other Intel and AMD CPUs over the years.

Windows 10 Radeon Software vs. Ubuntu 17.04 + Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev
With having carried out a new Windows 10 install this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL / VirtualBox benchmarking, I used this as a fresh opportunity for some new Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmark figures.

Linux 4.12 I/O Scheduler Tests With A HDD & SSD
Earlier in the Linux 4.12 cycle I delivered a number of I/O scheduler benchmarks from a solid-state drive while for this article are some fresh I/O scheduler tests using a slower SSD as well as a conventional HDD. Schedulers tested were CFQ, Noop, deadline, MQ None, MQ Kyber, MQ BFQ, and MQ Deadline.

Windows 10 WSL vs. VirtualBox Ubuntu Performance On An Intel Core i9 7900X
Going beyond last week's Intel Core i9 7900X Skylake-X Linux distribution comparison, here are some complementary tests when trying out the latest Windows 10 Insider Build with its Bash/Windows Subsystem for Linux featuring Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Additionally, some comparison results when running Windows 10 with VirtualBox and then an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS guest, all from this i9-7900X high-end desktop.

Mesa GL Thread Testing With Pentium + Core i7 & RX 580 + R9 Fury
With Mesa's GL threading support ready for wider testing and the developers pursuing per-application enabling of this driver-agnostic Mesa OpenGL multi-threading work, here are some benchmarks of mesa_glthread when using a Pentium and Core i7 CPUs as well as a Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury.

Days Away From Branching, How Mesa 17.2 RadeonSI Performance Compares To Mesa 17.1
With Mesa 17.2 due to be branched by the end of the week and thus place this quarterly update to Mesa under a feature freeze, here are some fresh benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI OpenGL driver on 17.2-dev compared to v17.1.4 stable as well as a few RADV Vulkan benchmarks too.

NVIDIA vs. Radeon Vulkan & OpenGL Performance With A Celeron, Pentium & Core i7
Here is an interesting OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark comparison where I take two competing NVIDIA and AMD cards, the Radeon RX 580 and GeForce GTX 1060, and test the available benchmark-friendly OpenGL/Vulkan Linux games while doing these tests each on an Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core i7 processors in looking at the performance scaling.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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