8-Way Linux Distribution Benchmarks On The Intel Core i9 9900K - One Distro Wins 67% Of The Time

Following last week's release of the Intel Core i9 9900K, I spent several days testing various Linux distributions on this latest Core i9 CPU paired with the new ASUS Z390-A PRIME motherboard. I was testing not only to see that all of the Linux distributions were playing fine with this latest and greatest desktop hardware but also how the performance was looking. Benchmarked this round on the i9-9900K was Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 18.10, Clear Linux 25720, Debian Buster Testing, Manjaro 18.0-RC3, Fedora Workstation 29, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and CentOS 7.

The Intel Core i9 9900K as a reminder is the company's first desktop 8-core CPU plus Hyper Threading. The 9900K has a base clock frequency of 3.6GHz but can clock up to 5.0GHz while having a 16MB L3 cache, dual channel DDR4-2666 support, UHD Graphics 630, and the entire processor fits within a 95 Watt power budget. The launch price on this new Core i9 9900K is $500 USD. See last week's Core i9 9900K benchmark results for more information on how this CPU competes with the AMD Ryzen processors and compares to past Intel CPUs, even seeing how it compares to the old Core 990X.

The same system was used throughout the entire testing (obviously) and that consisted of the Intel Core i9 9900K at stock frequencies, ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 Corsair memory, Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD, and a Radeon RX 580 graphics card.

All eight tested Linux distributions were run in their stock / out-of-the-box configuration.

All of these Linux benchmarks on the Intel Core i9 9900K were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.