AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 Performance With The Ryzen 9 9950X On Linux

There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.

The ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-E GAMING WIFI motherboard I've been using for my tests rolled out their 2401 BETA BIOS last week that moves to the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2. I ran some benchmarks with this BETA BIOS compared to my launch-day benchmarks with the launch-day BIOS of the time.

No other changes were made to the system hardware or software state with just looking at the performance difference of moving to this newer BETA BIOS with the updated AGESA and any other subtle changes made by AMD/ASUS in the past month. The newest BIOS also delivers updated Zen 5 CPU microcode.

All of the same benchmarks were conducted while also monitoring the CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt in looking for any differences in nearly 400 benchmarks.