Steam, Open-Source Intel & Ryzen 3000 / EPYC's Continued Domination Rocked September
Below is a look at the most popular content on Phoronix for September from the roughly 10 original news articles per day and one featured article/review. As always, if you enjoy the new content on Phoronix each and every day and our relentless Linux benchmarking, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium, considering a PayPal tip, or at the very least not using any ad-blocker when viewing this website. Thanks. You can also be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
The most popular featured articles/reviews for September included:
The Sandy Bridge Core i7 3960X Benchmarked Against Today's Six-Core / 12 Thread AMD/Intel CPUs
Complementing our recent AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Linux benchmarking, with recently having out the Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, here are benchmarks showing that previous $999 USD six-core / twelve-thread processor compared to today's Ryzen 5 3600X (and previous-generation Ryzen 5 2600X) as well as the Core i7 8700K.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Benchmarks On 11 Linux Distributions
Now that BIOS updates over the past month have resolved the early boot issue with Ryzen 3000 processors and thus the new AMD CPUs playing nicely with modern Linux distributions, here is the long-awaited benchmark comparison of the Ryzen 9 3900X + X570 system benchmarked across an array of different Linux distributions... In fact, 11 Linux OS releases in total were tested on this high-end 12-core / 24-thread desktop processor.
Running The AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 Boost Fix Under Linux With 140 Tests
Last week AMD's AGESA "ABBA" update began shipping with a fix to how the boost clock frequencies are handled in hopes of better achieving the rated boost frequencies for Ryzen 3000 series processors. I've been running some tests of an updated ASUS BIOS with this adjusted boost clock behavior to see how it performs under Linux with a Ryzen 9 3900X processor.
Running Intel's Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Rome? Still Significant Performance Uplift Over Ubuntu
The current AMD EPYC 7742 2P benchmarking that is happening at Phoronix is an interesting Linux/BSD operating system performance comparison. That's in the works while so far are some Ubuntu and Clear Linux numbers. Yes, Intel's open-source Clear Linux platform does run fine generally on AMD hardware -- including the new AMD "Rome" processors -- and generally does still run damn fast. Here is a look at Clear Linux on this 128 core / 256 thread server with Clear Linux against Ubuntu 19.04 as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10.
NVIDIA RTX 2060 / 2070 / 2080 SUPER Linux Gaming Performance - 26 GPUs Benchmarked
We finally have our hands on NVIDIA's current RTX 20 SUPER graphics card line-up and have been putting the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER cards through their paces under Linux. For the first of our long awaited NVIDIA RTX SUPER Linux benchmarks, first up is a look at the Linux gaming performance under a variety of native OpenGL/Vulkan games as well as Steam Play (DXVK+Proton) titles while testing a total of 26 graphics cards this round on the very latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce drivers.
8-Way Linux Distribution Benchmarks On The AMD EPYC 7742 2P Server
A few days ago I provided some benchmarks showing how running Intel's open-source Clear Linux on AMD EPYC Rome can provide some significant speed-ups over Ubuntu Linux, but how do other Linux distributions compare on AMD's new Zen 2 server processors? Here is an eight-way benchmark comparison on the AMD EPYC 7742 2P Daytona server with its 128 cores / 256 threads.
Firefox 69 / 70 Beta Against Chrome 76 On Ubuntu Linux
With Firefox 69 released and Firefox 70 entering beta, here are some fresh web browser benchmarks between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome from Ubuntu Linux. On the Firefox size, Firefox 68, 69, and 70 Beta were tested with and without WebRender being enabled and compared to Google's current Chrome 76 stable release.
AMD EPYC 7302 / 7402 / 7502 / 7742 Linux Performance Benchmarks
Last month we provided launch-day benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 7502 and 7742 under Linux in both 1P and 2P configurations for these exciting "Rome" Zen 2 server processors. For your viewing pleasure today is a fresh look at not only the EPYC 7502 and 7742 processors under the latest Linux 5.3 kernel but we've also expanded it to looking at the EPYC 7302 and EPYC 7402 processors as well with those processors recently being sent over by AMD. Under Ubuntu 19.04 with Linux 5.3, these four different AMD EPYC 7002 series SKUs were benchmarked along with some of the older AMD Naples processors and Intel Xeon Gold/Platinum processors for a fresh look at the Linux server performance.
AMD EPYC 7642 Benchmarks
Since the AMD EPYC 7002 series "Rome" launch at the beginning of August, it's been known how AMD's top-end (aside from the newly-announced EPYC 7H12) EPYC 7742 easily outperforms the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 in most real-world benchmarks. The EPYC 7742 not only outperforms the Xeon Platinum 8280 in raw performance but also at a significantly lower cost and it gets even better with the EPYC 7642. We have been testing the EPYC 7642 48-core processors and even there the performance is generally ahead of a Xeon Platinum 8280 while being about half the cost of that flagship non-AP Intel Xeon Scalable Cascadelake processor.
AMD/Intel Benchmarks: Building The Mainline Linux x86_64 Kernel With LLVM Clang
With the upcoming LLVM Clang 9.0 compiler release there is an amazing achievement more than a decade in the making... The mainline Clang compiler can finally build the mainline Linux x86_64 kernel. The AArch64 state has been in better shape in recent years with multiple Arm vendors using Clang as their default compiler including to build the Linux kernel, but finally in 2019 the mainline Clang can build mainline Linux x86_64. There are a few caveats, but in this article is my experience in doing so with LLVM Clang and the Linux 5.3 kernel as well as running some preliminary benchmarks on AMD and Intel hardware.
And the most popular news:
Systemd-homed: Systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling
Kicking off today in Berlin is the annual All Systems Go conference focused on systemd and other user-space components. Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering presented on systemd-homed as a new component to systemd that is focused on improving home directory handling.
How Intel's Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms
Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms.
Linux 5.4 To Fix Many Newer 64-bit Windows Games On Wine / Steam Play
A kernel patch from CodeWeavers is landing in the Linux 5.4 kernel and will help some 64-bit Windows games run nicely under Wine (and the likes of CrossOver / Valve's Proton) with newer Intel and AMD systems.
Microsoft's Latest Open-Source Contribution: A New Font For Terminals & Code Editors
This week Microsoft not only open-sourced their C++ standard library (STL) but they have also now shipped Cascadia Code.
How Google's Android Maintains A Stable Linux Kernel ABI
While the Linux kernel is well known for not offering a stable API/ABI, Google and other enterprise Linux distribution vendors tend to aim at providing their own stable ABI for the lifespan of their products. Google engineers talked in Portugal this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 about some of their means to maintaining a stable API/ABI for Android's Linux kernel.
Intel's Open-Source VP9 Video Encoder Just Scored A Massive ~3x Performance Boost
Intel's open-source team continues showing the power of optimizations... Or rather in this case, a three fold performance improvement due to previously limiting an AVX-512 routine that also works on AVX-2 CPUs. SVT-VP9 is now a lot faster on AVX2 CPUs from both Intel and AMD.
Google Releases Android 10 With "Vulkan Everywhere", Privacy Improvements
Google has officially released Android 10 today, what formerly was known as "Android Q" during development.
Facebook Engineer Proposing New Slab Memory Controller For Linux - Saves Lots Of RAM
Roman Gushchin of Facebook's Linux kernel engineering team has proposed a new slab memory controller for the Linux kernel.
Firefox 69 Gearing Up For Release With Linux Performance Improvements
Firefox 69.0 is set to be officially released tomorrow but for those eager to upgrade the release binaries have now hit their FTP server.
Richard Stallman Resigns From The Free Software Foundation
Richard M Stallman has resigned as president from the Free Software Foundation and from his Board of Directors post.
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