The Ryzen 7 1800X Linux Performance Evolution Since The AMD Zen Launch

With it quickly approaching two years since the launch of the original AMD Ryzen processors and complementing our other end-of-2018 Linux performance benchmarks, in this article are some fresh benchmarks seeing how the Linux performance at the start of 2017 on the Ryzen 7 1800X compares to the latest Linux performance at the start of 2019.

As some interesting benchmarks to kick off the new year, on the same AMD Ryzen 7 1800X + MSI X370 POWER GAMING TITANIUM system I re-ran benchmarks using Ubuntu 17.04 to represent the Linux performance back when these "znver1" processors first debuted with the Linux 4.10 kernel, Mesa 17.0.3, and GCC 6.3 compiler. After running the benchmarks on that old Ubuntu configuration, I did a fresh daily snapshot install of Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" in its current development state. On top of the Ubuntu Disco development build I also pulled in the Linux 4.21 development Git kernel as of 3 January and also built a fresh snapshot of the GCC 9.0.0 compiler that has the latest AMD Zen microarchitecture optimizations.

On these two Ubuntu configurations, I ran a wide variety of benchmarks on this Ryzen 7 1800X system for seeing how the performance has changed. All of these benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite.