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

In total I ran nearly 400 benchmarks across all the CPUs. When taking the geometric mean of all the raw performance results, the Ryzen 9 9950X came out to being 17.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile was 21.5% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X across this wide mix of workloads. The Ryzen 9 9950X was 33% faster than the Intel Core i9 14900K performance overall and even the Ryzen 9 9900X was 18% faster than the Core i9 14900K. For those still on AM4, the Ryzen 9 9950X was delivering 1.87x the performance of the Ryzen 9 5950X processor. These are some great gains found with the Ryzen 9 9900 series.

With the Intel Core benchmarks it's also worth mentioning that the testing was prior to the newly-released Intel 0x129 microcode update and I'll have more benchmarks with that change soon. As of writing the Core i9 14900K is retailing for around $550 USD while the Ryzen 9 9950X is set to retail for around 18% more but delivering 33% greater performance on a geo mean basis overall. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile at $499 is around $50 less than the i9-14900K while overall delivering 18% better performance. A slam dunk in performance, value, and power efficiency with the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series compared to the competition.

Making the Ryzen 9 9900 series results even more impressive was their power use. Over the span of all the benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 9950X had an average power use of 137 Watts and a peak of 201 Watts. The Ryzen 9 7950X meanwhile had a 142 Watt average and 236 Watt peak while the Core i9 14900K had a 156 Watt average and 347 Watt peak. Stunning power efficiency results with the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 9 9900X also came out well with a 117 Watt average compared to 133 Watts with the Ryzen 9 7900X.

For those doing a lot of code compilation either as part of a software development job, running a source-based Linux distribution like Gentoo or Arch Linux, or looking at Ryzen for budget servers for a CI/CD build farm, the Ryzen 9 7950X is a fabulous option for its performance and power efficiency. Across all of the codebases tested there were great speed-ups with the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X compared to the Intel competition and prior Ryzen 7000 series parts.

Across the dozens of creator workloads from Blender and other renderers to imaging tasks and similar workloads, the Ryzen 9 9950X geo mean there was 1.18x the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X or 1.42x the performance of the Core i9 14900K.

The cryptography performance with Zen 5 across OpenSSL, Gcrypt, Cryptsetup, Cpuminer-opt, and Xmrig was really terrific.

The Ryzen 9 9900 series also now edged past the Intel competition with various database workloads should you be looking at assembling a budget server or just looking ahead for Zen 5 EPYC product estimates.

The HPC benchmarks also showed the Ryzen 9 9900 series particularly well thanks to the many AVX-512 relevant workloads.

Likewise, the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9900X dominated in the machine learning benchmarks from TensorFlow to OpenVINO thanks to the 512-bit data path AVX-512 implementation.

Simply put, I am extremely impressed with the Ryzen 9 9900 series. If you are a creator, developer, or just doing any heavy lifting on your desktop across a range of workloads, the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X proved to be terrific options. These new AMD Ryzen 9900 series processors deliver great generational uplift and better power efficiency than the prior Ryzen 9 7900 series parts and the Intel Core 14th Gen competition. At $499 USD for the Ryzen 9 9900X and $649 USD for the Ryzen 9 9950X these processors are also priced fair.

If you are currently on an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 series platform it may be hard justifying the upgrade to the Ryzen 9 9900 series unless you are engaging AVX-512 heavy workloads, doing very frequent code compilation / creator tasks, and/or care a great deal about energy efficiency. But if you are still on an AM4 platform or an existing Intel Core platform and are a creator, developer, or frequently compiling code (Arch Linux and Gentoo users, among others) and other multi-threaded tasks under Linux, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series is wonderful. Beyond desktop use-cases, these benchmarks show the versatility of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series across many diverse workloads and the potential of the 9900X/9950X in Ryzen for servers and making great SOHO servers and other budget-friendly server-type deployments. The only main reason to hold off on upgrading now would be if your workloads could benefit from 3D V-Cache and being curious about the potential and pricing for presumed Ryzen 9000 series X3D variants and/or wanting to see how Intel Arrow Lake will play out in the months ahead.

Thanks to AMD for supplying these review samples for Linux testing and stay tuned for more Ryzen 9000 series benchmarks in an AVX-512 on/off comparison, more DDR5 memory speed testing, and a variety of other Linux performance follow-up articles. If you enjoy all my relentless Linux testing, please consider joining Phoronix Premium during these difficult times for the web publisher industry and to avoid web ads on this site, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode, and other benefits.