Intel Arrow Lake, AMD EPYC Turin & Linux Kernel Drama Made For An Interesting October
Below is a look at what was most popular on Phoronix during the month of October. As always, if you appreciate all of the work I invest into the site every single day, please consider showing your support or at least disabling ad-blockers on this site. You can join Phoronix Premium to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other benefits while helping to support the site financially to continue. Tips via PayPal and Stripe remain graciously accepted. The sad state of the web ad industry at large and increasing pressures on small web publishers continue to make for a tough environment especially for one man shop's such as myself. Thank you for your support over 20 years now of running Phoronix.
The most popular reviews/featured articles on Phoronix for the last month included:
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Delivers Strong Linux Performance
Earlier this month Intel announced the Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake" processors and today they go on sale. In turn, the review embargo also lifts for these new desktop processors. Up first today on Phoronix is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux performance review for this flagship 24-core desktop processor.
AMD EPYC 9755 / 9575F / 9965 Benchmarks Show Dominating Performance
Last month Intel introduced their Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors with up to 128 P cores, MRDIMM support, and other improvements as a big step-up in performance and power efficiency for their server processors. The Xeon 6900P series showed they could tango with the AMD EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo processors in a number of areas, but Genoa has been around since November 2022... With today's AMD 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" launch, Zen 5 is coming to servers and delivers stunning performance and power efficiency. The new top-end AMD EPYC Turin processor performance can obliterate the competition in most workloads and delivers a great generational leap in performance and power efficiency. Here are our first 5th Gen AMD EPYC Turin benchmarks in looking at the EPYC 9575F, EPYC 9755, and EPYC 9965 processors across many workloads and testing in both single and dual socket configurations.
AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Dominates Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake Performance For Linux Developers & Creators
Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.
Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.10 Performance For Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake
Following my recent Intel Core Ultra 7 200V "Lunar Lake" Linux benchmarks and looking at the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics (including Windows 11 vs. Linux already), you may be wondering about the Lunar Lake CPU performance between Windows and Linux... Here are some benchmarks of the ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24.10 Linux.
Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Linux Performance
Yesterday for the Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake launch date was my extensive look at the Core Ultra 9 285K under Ubuntu Linux for that 24-core desktop processor. Under focus today is the lower-tier Intel Core Ultra 5 245K with a large variety of Linux performance benchmarks for showing how this 14-core processor compares to prior Intel Core CPUs as well as the AMD Ryzen competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
AVX-512 Performance With 256-bit vs. 512-bit Data Path For AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs
Now past the launch day for the AMD EPYC 9005 series server processors and having delivered initial AMD EPYC Zen 5 benchmarks for the EPYC 9575F / EPYC 9755 / EPYC 9965 SKUs, it's onto one of my favorite areas of testing and that is the more focused benchmarks looking at different specific changes/features of new processors. Today under the benchmarking microscope is looking at the new AVX-512 512-bit data path capabilities of 5th Gen AMD EPYC compared to using a 256-bit data path or disabling AVX-512 entirely.
AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" Delivers Better Performance/Power Efficiency vs. AmpereOne 192-Core ARM CPU
Complementing the AMD EPYC 9575F / 9755 / 9965 performance benchmarks article looking at those Turin processors up against prior AMD EPYC CPUs and the Intel Xeon competition, this article is looking squarely at the 192-core EPYC 9965 "Turin Dense" processor compared to Ampere Computing's AmpereOne A192-32X flagship processor. It's an x86_64 vs. AArch64 battle at the leading 192 core count for performance and CPU power efficiency.
System76 Thelio Astra Reviewed: High-End ARM64 Developer Desktop
System76 is announcing one of their most innovative and interesting products going back to their Launch Configurable Keyboard and HP Dev One collaboration: the System76 Thelio Astra. The Thelio Astra is a high-end ARM64 desktop system geared for developers with a focus on AI / STEM / self-driving technologies and powered by Ampere Computing and NVIDIA.
Intel Lunar Lake vs. AMD Strix Point Platform Profile Performance Comparison
For those that have been eager to see more Intel Core Ultra Series 200V Lunar Lake Linux testing, here is the latest installment of testing as well as an update from Intel following my Lunar Lake Linux testing recent reports. Today's article is looking at Intel Lunar Lake versus AMD Strix Point across different ACPI Platform Profile configurations for whether you are after peak performance or the most power savings.
AMD EPYC 9755 DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Memory Performance
With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.
And then the most popular news of the month...
Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted
Following yesterday's news first featured on Phoronix of several Linux driver maintainers being de-listed from their maintainer positions within the mainline Linux kernel over their connections to Russia, Linus Torvalds has today commented on the matter.
Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source
Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.
Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Quietly merged into this week's Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers.
Some Clarity On The Linux Kernel's "Compliance Requirements" Around Russian Sanctions
When a number of Russian Linux developers were removed from their MAINTAINERS file in the Linux kernel, it was described as due to "compliance requirements" but vague in what those requirements entailed. Linus Torvalds then commented on the Russian Linux maintainers being de-listed and made it clear that they were done due to government compliance requirements / legal issues around Russia. Now today some additional light has been shed on those new Linux kernel "compliance requirements".
Linus Torvalds Growing Frustrated By Buggy Hardware & Theoretical CPU Attacks
Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being "overkill and painfully slow." The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU security mitigations.
Bcachefs Fixes Pull Once Again Frustrates Linus Torvalds - Two Choices Offered
Linus Torvalds merged the newest round of fixes to the experimental Bcachefs file-system, but it's left Linux creator Linus Torvalds frustrated and he's presented two choices for the file-system moving forward due to the continued LKML drama.
NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors
At the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.
Rust-Written Rustls Now Reportedly Outperforming OpenSSL & BoringSSL
Rustls was initially talked up as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees. But now besides the talked up advantages due to being written in Rust, it has reached the point of reportedly being faster than both OpenSSL and BoringSSL.
"100% Free" GNU Boot Discovers Again They Have Been Shipping Non-Free Code
GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.
Linus Torvalds Asks Kernel Developers To Write Better Git Merge Commit Messages
Yesterday when announcing the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel, Linus Torvalds asked that the kernel maintainers do a better job moving forward with their commit messages.
The Long-Awaited GIMP 3.0 Closing In On Its First Release Candidate
The long-in-development GIMP 3.0 open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop hopes to ship its release candidate in the near future.
Some Intel Linux Driver Maintainers Have Left The Company
With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.
AMD Linux Graphics Driver To Switch To More Aggressive Power Heuristics By Default
It looks like for the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.
KDE Plasma 6.2 Released With More Desktop Polishing
KDE Plasma 6.2 is now available as the latest refinement to the modern Plasma 6 desktop environment.
Ubuntu Considers Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut
As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux.
NetworkManager 1.50 Released - Now Ensures Offensive Terms Don't Appear In Settings
NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.
ReiserFS File-System Expected To Be Removed With Linux 6.13
With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that... ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase.
Linus Torvalds Lands A 2.6% Performance Improvement With Minor Linux Kernel Patch
Linus Torvalds merged a patch on Wednesday that he authored that with reworking a few lines of code is able to score a 2.6% improvement within Intel's well-exercise "will it scale" per-thread-ops benchmark test case.
Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns
Following the recent concerns over Bitwarden potentially moving further away from open-source given SDK changes that appeared, Bitwarden has now further addressed the situation to ease the community concerns.
ZLUDA Takes On Third Life: Open-Source Multi-GPU CUDA Implementation Focused On AI
The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.
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