AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X & 2970WX Linux Performance Benchmarks

To little surprise, the AMD Threadripper processors tended to offer much better value than the Intel Core i9 processors.

In some cases, the difference is quite extreme.

Even in the single-threaded tests where Threadripper was behind the current Intel CPUs, the performance-per-dollar still makes it very competitive against Intel.

The Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX come in as very nice complementary parts to round out the current Threadripper 2 family. The Threadripper 2920X was often outperforming the more expensive Core i9 7900X. The only sort of downside though to the 2920X at ~$649 is there are still new Threadripper 1950X processors available through Internet retailers in the $640~680 price-range. In the multi-core benchmarks, the 1950X does deliver better performance thanks to the four extra cores / eight threads while the 2920X is more power efficient, natively supports DDR4-2933 and other Zen+ benefits.

The AMD Threadripper 2970WX meanwhile fills the void nicely between the $899 Threadripper 2950X and the $1799 Threadripper 2990WX. The 2970WX still managed to come ahead of the Core i9 7960X ($1799) in many benchmarks as well as the Core i9 7980XE (~$2000) in a majority of the tests. Only in the basic single-threaded tests and in a few outliers like Rustlang and Tensorflow were we seeing outliers in the AMD Linux performance and that is currently being explored further.

If you are frequently running data simulations, OpenMPI/MPI scientific computing, frequent code compilation, or 3D modeling among other workloads, the AMD Threadripper 2 family offers rather sizable benefits at a wide variety of price points that are able to offer much more value/performance-per-dollar than the current Intel Core i9 line-up. In the pre-launch testing, there haven't been any Linux compatibility/support issues to note for any of these Threadripper 2 processors.

Similar to the many Threadripper 2 benchmarks in August, in the coming days/weeks will be further benchmarks of the AMD Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX benchmarks under various Linux distributions, trying out the BSDs, and other interesting open-source benchmarks.

Thanks again to AMD for sending out these review samples for being able to provide launch-day Linux benchmark results. The new AMD CPUs are available this morning from the likes of NewEgg.com and other major Internet retailers.