AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

I have been very much enjoying my time testing out AMD's Zen 5 wares from the Ryzen AI 300 series to the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X were great for whetting my appetite while awaiting the Ryzen 9 9900 series. I had been very much enjoying them to the extent I was rather surprised myself last week when hearing of some reviewers not finding much excitement out of these new Zen 5 processors but typically those just looking at Windows gaming performance or running only a few canned/synthetic benchmarks. Following the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Linux testing when the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X arrived, they were put immediately to my gauntlet of hundreds of Linux benchmarks and indeed living up to expectations.

The Ryzen 9 9900 series is great for Linux content creators, developers compiling a lot of code, using any AI/HPC type workloads leveraging AVX-512, or even just running lots of Python scripts/applications and other workloads with nice generational uplift there. For those that may be tasking Ryzen for servers in small offices / home offices, the Ryzen 9 9900 series offers great performance there too across a wide variety of database and server workloads. The raw performance has been great and the power efficiency of Zen 5 continues to be very compelling.

The Ryzen 9 9900X as a reminder is a 12-core / 24-thread part that features a 4.4GHz base clock and a maximum boost clock up to 5.6GHz. The Ryzen 9 9900X has a 120 Watt default TDP and 64MB L3 cache. The Ryzen 9 9900X is priced at $499 USD.

The Ryzen 9 9950X meanwhile is the 16-core / 32-thread current-flagship processor with a 4.3GHz base clock and a maximum boost clock up to 5.7GHz. The Ryzen 9 9950X has a 170 Watt default TDP and 64MB L3 cache. The Ryzen 9 9950X is priced at $649 USD.

The Ryzen 9 9900 series works great on Linux. The details remain the same as in my 9600X/9700X Linux review. The main caveat is the RAPL power monitoring for Zen 5 CPUs not yet being merged to mainline for the PowerCap driver, should you be interested in power monitoring of your new processor under Linux. And another caveat is the LLVM/Clang compiler not yet having upstream "Znver5" targeting support for AMD Zen 5 processors while on the GCC side that can be found in GCC 14 should you want to spin out optimized binaries for targeting these new processors.

The spectrum of processors for today's review included the following:

- Core i5 13600K
- Core i9 13900K
- Core i5 14600K
- Core i9 14900K
- Ryzen 7 5800X
- Ryzen 7 5800X3D
- Ryzen 9 5900X
- Ryzen 9 5950X
- Ryzen 5 7600
- Ryzen 5 7600X
- Ryzen 7 7700
- Ryzen 7 7700X
- Ryzen 7 7800X3D
- Ryzen 9 7900
- Ryzen 9 7900X
- Ryzen 9 7900X3D
- Ryzen 9 7950X
- Ryzen 9 7950X3D
- Ryzen 5 9600X
- Ryzen 7 9700X
- Ryzen 9 9900X
- Ryzen 9 9950X

Compared to the 9600X/9700X review, some of the lower-end Intel/AMD processors for comparison were removed to make the graphs a bit less overwhelming with performance data. All of these processors were tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.10 kernel and GCC 13.2 default compiler. All motherboards were with their latest BIOS, 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics used throughout. All DDR5-capable processors were using 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory while the Ryzen 5000 series was using 2 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory.

Thanks to AMD for supplying the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X processors for launch-day Linux testing on Phoronix.