The AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Continue To Impress On Linux

It's been just over one month since AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 series as the first processors part of the Zen 3 family. The Linux performance continues to be terrific with the Ryzen 5600X / 5800X / 5900X / 5950X parts in our continued benchmarking.

Some of the benchmarks that are in the works for publishing in the coming days and weeks include looking at Zen 3 compiler tuning on GCC and LLVM Clang now that patches are beginning to materialize, Radeon RX 6800 series performance with Ryzen 9 on Windows vs. Linux, Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 20.04/20.10 performance on the Ryzen 9 5900X, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 performance, an AMD Smart Memory Access comparison on Linux, and also checking out how well the BSDs like FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD perform with the Ryzen 5000 series. Those are just the tests currently in the works but more will surely be coming as well - throughout all the ongoing tests, the performance continues to impress.

Outside of the performance, the only Linux issues have been the ones I've mentioned since launch day: the unfortunate matter of the compiler support coming after launch and thus in turn taking months before being found in stable distributions, the AMD Zen 3 temperature support only appearing with Linux 5.10 that will debut as stable this weekend, and no AMD_Energy driver support for the Ryzen 5000 series processors at this point. But aside from those issues, which admittedly don't affect many users directly, it's been a very pleasant support experience paired with modern Linux distributions.

From my ongoing testing as well as from other Linux-based reviewers and the community that gets their hands on these new processors, more benchmarks continue to be uploaded via the Phoronix Test Suite to OpenBenchmarking.org.

On the individual search pages for the Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 5 5600X continue to be the individual percentile rankings for these processors in the different benchmarks out of the hundreds available via the Phoronix Test Suite. For many tests these Zen 3 processors are up around the 99th percentile or better out of all the benchmarks found on OpenBenchmarking.org.

You can also enjoy a Ryzen 5950X vs. 5900X vs. 5800X vs. 5600X performance overview. As of writing there are 236 unique test cases with enough statistically significant data displayed in common for these four Ryzen 5000 series processors. From that page you can also add additional processors to the dynamic comparison for further insight -- some 350+ other processors but obviously the number of test cases in common and with enough statistical significance to display any composite number will vary based on processor. From that page you can also punch in your own CPU prices for custom performance-per-dollar metrics.

Of course via the Phoronix Test Suite you can also fire up your own benchmarks to see how your system(s) compare to these Ryzen 5000 series processors. Enjoy and stay tuned for more Linux benchmarks of these parts.