AMD Threadripper 1950X Linux Benchmarks

Here's a look at the AC system power consumption over the span of all the benchmarks carried out for this Threadripper Linux review. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X yielded an average power draw of 171 Watts while the Core i9 7900X average was actually at 179 Watts. The peak was also slightly lower on the 1950X. This is a bit surprising considering the 7900X has a lower reported TDP than the 1950X, but keep in mind the CPU frequency scaling governor on all these CPUs set during testing was to "performance" so these numbers may be slightly higher than if using ondemand/powersave governors. The minimum AC power draw for the 1950X configuration was 20 Watts higher than the i9-7900X system.

Both the Core i9 7900X and Threadripper 1950X are certainly power-hungry, but if you can keep them cooled sufficiently and have a reliable power supply, they have a lot of performance to offer. The Threadripper 1950X was leading in many of the Linux benchmarks carried out in this article when it came to the multi-threaded tests, particularly for the applications well leveraging OpenMP. The extra cores/threads of the Threadripper 1950X was yielding double digit leads over the similarly-priced Core i9 7900X in many of the benchmarks carried out.

But where the Threadripper struggles is the same as with the other Ryzen CPUs with Intel's newer CPUs yielding more instructions per cycle (IPC) than these first-generation Zen processors. But if you have plenty of threaded workloads from compilation tasks to cryptography, OpenMP, ray-tracing, and similar tasks, the Threadripper 1950X can blow past the Core i9 7900X under Linux.

The only Linux-specific gripe that remains with Threadripper is over the lack of a thermal driver for being able to accurately check the CPU core temperatures, but that is hopefully coming soon. And then the only other downsides besides the lower IPC performance compared to Intel is the price of the CPU, which is retailing for around $999 USD.

To look at more benchmark results and more performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics, the entire result data set is available via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. To see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the Threadripper 1950X and these other Intel/AMD Ubuntu results, install the Phoronix Test Suite and simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1708274-TY-AMDTHREAD89 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison in a standardized and reproducible manner.

Stay tuned for some high-end desktop Linux gaming tests, Threadripper compiler comparison, BSD/Linux OS comparison, and several other interesting Threadripper-driven benchmarks on Phoronix in the days and weeks ahead.