New AMD Ryzen CPUs, Intel Sapphire Rapids, Rust Adoption & More In Q1
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Now onto the Q1'2023 highlights, starting first with the most popular Linux hardware reviews / featured content for the quarter:
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance
Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.
AMD Ryzen 5 7600 / Ryzen 7 7700 / Ryzen 9 7900 Linux Performance
Last week at the AMD CES 2023 keynote hosted by Lisa Su, new 65 Watt Ryzen 7000 series processors were announced. These more affordable Zen 4 processors are going retail this week and today marks the embargo lift. Up on the Linux testing block are the Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 9 7900 processors.
Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H "Sapphire Rapids" Performance Benchmarks
Now that the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and Xeon CPU Max Series overview is out of the way, you are probably very eager to see some independent performance benchmarks of the much anticipated Sapphire Rapids CPUs that are going up against AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors for 2023... For kicking off our Sapphire Rapids benchmarking, first up is a look at the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance under Linux as the flagship SKU.
Orange Pi 5 Is A Great & Very Fast Alternative To The Raspberry Pi 4
With an 8-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC, the Orange Pi 5 is leaps and bounds faster than the aging Raspberry Pi 4. With up to 32GB of RAM, the Orange Pi 5 is also capable of serving for a more diverse user-base and even has enough potential for assembling a budget Arm Linux developer desktop. I've been testing out the Orange Pi 5 the past few weeks and it's quite fast and nice for its low price point.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 / RTX 4090 Linux Performance
Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.
The Technical Workloads Where AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D CPUs Are Excellent
While the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are promoted as great "gaming processors", these new Zen 4 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache also have great capabilities for various technical computing workloads thanks to the hefty cache size. In prior articles I've looked at the Ryzen 9 7900X3D/7950X3D in around 400 workloads on Linux while in this article I am looking more closely at these technical computing areas where these AMD Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors show the most strength and value outside of gaming.
AVX-512 Performance Comparison: AMD Genoa vs. Intel Sapphire Rapids & Ice Lake
With last week's launch of Intel's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids server processors, Intel heavily talked up the shiny new accelerators and the big performance potential of AMX, but not really showcased and only heard through the grapevine was the improved AVX-512 implementation found with these new processors. With Sapphire Rapids there is reduced penalties from engaging AVX-512 -- and for some AVX-512 instructions, no longer any measurable impact -- compared to prior generation Xeon processors. In this article is a look at the performance for a wide variety of workloads with AVX-512 on/off not just for Sapphire Rapids but also for prior generation Ice Lake as well as AMD's new EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" processors where they have introduced AVX-512 for the first time.
The Performance Impact From Different Arch Linux Kernel Flavors
Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.
X.Org vs. Wayland Linux Gaming Performance For NVIDIA GeForce + AMD Radeon In Early 2023
With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.
NVIDIA Gaming/GPU Performance: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks
Last week was a fresh look at the AMD Radeon graphics/gaming performance between Windows and Linux using the very latest drivers. Today the testing wrapped up from some holiday benchmarking looking at the NVIDIA GeForce performance under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.10 Linux for how the drivers on both operating systems are currently competing.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/4080 Linux Compute CUDA & OpenCL Benchmarks, Blender Performance
Last week I published a number of Linux gaming benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 high-end graphics cards now that they finally arrived for my Linux testing on Phoronix. For those more interested in creator workloads and GPU OpenCL and CUDA compute performance for these high-end consumer Ada Lovelace graphics cards, this article is for you with an initial look at the compute performance across a wide range of workloads from Blender OptiX and CUDA rendering to common OpenCL GPU benchmarks.
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux Gaming Performance
After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today's article I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D thus far, today's article is just getting things started in looking at the Linux gaming performance -- both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to Valve's wonderful Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D-Proton) software.
Intel Arc Graphics A770: Windows 11 vs. Linux Benchmarks
Following the year-end looks at Windows 11 vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, today's article is my first look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for Intel Arc Graphics with the flagship A770 graphics card.
Intel's Open-Source Linux Compute Stack Maturing Very Well For Arc Graphics
From early December to late February there was an absence of new Compute-Runtime updates for that open-source stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. It was out of trend as they worked to move from a weekly~biweekly release rhythm to a monthly release cadence while taking extra time for making various other changes too. After that three month lull, they are back to pushing out new compute updates and damn it's looking nice. At least in my testing, the progress they've quietly made over the past few months has been very nice for the compute stack compatibility/support and performance.
Intel Core i5 13400 Linux Performance - Raptor Lake 10 Cores / 16 Threads For $239
Earlier this month at CES, Intel announced the 35 and 65 Watt Raptor Lake processors alongside the 13th Gen Core Mobile CPUs. Those new Raptor Lake desktop CPUs are now available from multiple Internet retailers and the mid-range Core i5 13400 recently arrived at Phoronix to put it through its paces under Linux.
AMD Radeon vs. Intel Arc Graphics With Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0
Following the Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with Intel Arc Graphics from last week, in today's article is a look at how the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 are competing to the AMD Radeon graphics when using the very latest Linux 6.2 kernel along with Mesa 23.0-devel for providing the very latest open-source graphics driver support from each vendor.
Linux 6.2 Performance Option Helps Extend The Longevity Of Intel Skylake Era PCs
One of the new features introduced with Linux 6.2 is Call Depth Tracking and it can help extend the useful service life of Intel Skylake through Coffeelake era processors in providing better performance than is otherwise found out-of-the-box on Linux.
AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora & Ubuntu On AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa
Over the holidays some fun benchmarking was to be had with the dual AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" processors providing a combined 192 cores / 384 threads and seeing how various modern Linux distributions were competing for this flagship 4th Gen EPYC server configuration. Up on the testing block was AlmaLinux 9.1, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 37930, Debian 12 Testing, Fedora Server 37, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04 daily.
DDR5 Memory Channel Scaling Performance With AMD EPYC 9004 Series
In addition to the big performance uplift from AVX-512, up to 96 cores per socket, and other Zen 4 architectural improvements, also empowering the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors is the support for up to 12 channels of DDR5-4800 memory. In this article is a wide assortment of benchmarks looking at the AMD EPYC 9654 performance across varying numbers of populated DDR5 memory channels.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Linux Performance After Three Years
Today marks three years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first HEDT chip sporting 64 cores / 128 threads. While based on Zen 2, the shear multi-threaded compute power of the Threadripper 3990X still bodes well today. Besides 64 cores / 128 threads still being a lot, Linux software improvements over the past three years have helped maintain the competitiveness of the Threadripper 3990X. In today's benchmarks are results from the System76 Thelio Major as tested back in 2020 based on Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the very latest state today when running an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot on the same system and using a Linux 6.2 Git kernel.
And the most popular news for Q1:
Intel Publishes Blazing Fast AVX-512 Sorting Library, Numpy Switching To It For 10~17x Faster Sorts
Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups.
The Rust Implementation Of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust
Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
ipmitool Repository Archived, Developer Suspended By GitHub
The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
Linux 6.3 Introducing Hardware Noise "hwnoise" Tool
As part of the tracing updates sent in for Linux 6.3 is the introduction of the new "hwnoise" tool within the kernel source tree for monitoring and quantifying hardware noise.
Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code To Be Removed
I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.
Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel.
DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Being Ported To NetBSD
NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD.
Linux's SystemV Filesystem Support Being Orphaned
The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future.
Steam On Linux Metrics End Out 2022 With Some Odd Numbers
Valve has just published the Steam Survey results for December 2022 that come in at a bit of a surprise.
Intel Continues With More Big-Time Optimizations To The Linux Kernel
I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel.
Linux Kernel Networking Driver Development Impacted By Russian Sanctions
The US and western government sanctions around the Russian government and its defense industry/companies due to their war in Ukraine has caused interesting issues in the open-source world. A few days after ipmitool was archived/suspended on GitHub that turned out to be due to the current maintainer's affiliation with a Russian tech company, separately there is now a blocking of Linux kernel contributions from selected Russian developers.
Vanilla OS 2.0 Shifting From Ubuntu Base To Debian Sid
One of the newer Linux distributions that has been making waves is Vanilla OS as an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu Linux that aims to provide a pleasant Linux desktop experience, close to upstream, and is augmented by the growing selection of Flatpak packages. Now though the project has decided to move from Ubuntu Linux as its base over to Debian Sid.
Firefox 109 vs. Chrome 109 Browser Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux + Core i9 13900K
It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases.
SSDFS Is The Newest Linux Filesystem & Catering To NVMe ZNS SSDs
Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" Hits Its First Freeze
Debian 12 (codenamed "Bookworm") is expected to be released later this year and as such the first of several code/package freezes has begun.
Linux Looks To Retire Itanium/IA64 Support
It's been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users.
Still Have A Use For Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working To Safely Emulate It In Rust
While Adobe Flash is officially -- and thankfully -- dead, those interested in Adobe Flash Player for nostalgia or archival purposes, Ruffle is working to emulate Adobe Flash support via this open-source project making use of the Rust programming language.
OBS Studio Lands AV1 & HEVC RTMP Streaming Support
In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.
OpenZFS Lands A Very Nice Performance Optimization
A very nice feature pull request was merged to OpenZFS that can provide a nice performance improvement to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation to kick off the new year.
Linux Preparing To Disable Drivers For Microsoft's RNDIS Protocol
With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns.
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