Core i9 7980XE vs. Threadripper 2990WX - The Pre/Post 2018 Linux Kernel Performance

Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance from the start to end of 2018 using an Intel Core i9 7980XE system. Here is the second part of that testing in looking at the same Linux 4.14 vs. 4.20 kernel benchmarking while putting the i9-7980XE performance side-by-side against the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX for seeing how its performance was impacted under the same kernel tests.

Using my two highest-end Intel/AMD HEDT systems, I benchmarked the Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Threadripper 2990WX systems using the Linux 4.14.4 kernel from the end of 2017 to that of Linux 4.20 Git for the current state of the mainline kernel performance with both systems equipped with quad channel memory, NVMe SSD storage, and focusing on I/O and system/CPU tests for this comparison.

Ubuntu 18.10 was the base operating system with GCC 8.2 and the EXT4 file-system while obtaining the Linux 4.14.4/4.20 kernels from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. With Linux 4.20 there was also a secondary run on each system in looking at the performance when disabling the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations that can be disabled at boot-time. These end-of-year 2018 reference benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.

The Core i9 7980XE box slowed down on the newer kernel partially due to Spectre/Meltdown mitigations but even still it was faster than the Threadripper 2990WX system in this basic test.

The Core i9 7980XE random read/write performance was slightly slower to the same on Linux 4.20 while the 2990WX system actually saw its performance slightly improve under Linux 4.20.

The Threadripper 2990WX CompileBench performance was also faster on the newer Linux kernel release.

In some of the Java tests, the Core i9 7980XE performance slowed down enough over the course of the year that its performance ended up being slower than the Threadripper 2990WX.

In the case of Numpy, the Core i9 7980XE continued offering faster performance over the AMD Threadripper 2 box and its performance improved with the newest kernel while the 2990WX performance was unchanged.