Quantifying The AVX-512 Performance Impact With AMD Zen 5 - Ryzen 9 9950X Benchmarks

With the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux review out of the way yesterday, today's benchmarking of the Ryzen 9000 series is looking closely at the AVX-512 performance impact. With the Ryzen 9000 series the Zen 5 cores have a full 512-bit data-path compared to the "double pumped" 256-bit data path found in the Zen 4 processors as well as the Strix Point SKUs. In this article is an AVX-512 enabled versus disabled comparison for not only the Ryzen 9 9950X but also the prior generation Ryzen 9 7950X and looking too at the CPU power use, thermals, and peak frequency when engaging a variety of AVX-512 workloads.

As illustrated in the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X and Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X benchmarks/reviews, the AVX-512 performance with Zen 5 is pretty darn great. AVX-512 workloads are benefiting a lot from the Ryzen 9000 series with its 512-bit data-path and I wanted to look closer at the difference with today's article by running the benchmarks with AVX-512 enabled and then disabled -- which can be done via the BIOS or by booting the Linux kernel with "clearcpuid=304" to prevent the AVX-512 extensions from being advertised to user-space.

On both the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 9950X I ran through the benchmarks with both AVX-512 enabled and then disabled. Plus monitoring the CPU power consumption, CPU peak frequency, and CPU core temperature to see the overall efficiency of the Zen 5 AVX-512 implementation and how it compares to Zen 4 where AVX-512 was originally introduced on the AMD side.

This is a very straight-forward comparison and with no other changes to the system hardware or software besides swapping the processors and then the secondary run of performance testing with AVX-512 disabled.