AMD Ryzen 5 7600 / Ryzen 7 7700 / Ryzen 9 7900 Linux Performance

In total I ran more than 300 different benchmarks across this wide assortment of processors while running Ubuntu 22.04 Linux.

Above is a look at the CPU power consumption during the entire duration of ~24 hours worth of benchmarking, across the wide range of workloads carried out. The Ryzen 5 7600 / Ryzen 7 7700 maintained around a 70~71 Watt average with a peak of 91 Watts while the Ryzen 9 7900 maintained a 73 Watt average and similar peak of 92 Watts. This is much lower than the Ryzen 7000 X-series parts and much lower than the Intel competition -- the Core i5 13600K meanwhile had a 95 Watt average with a peak of 167 Watts.

If taking the geometric mean of all 300+ Linux benchmarks conducted, here is the positioning of this assortment of Intel and AMD CPUs. The Ryzen 9 7900 was at 95% the speed of the Ryzen 9 7900X (while on average at 66% the power consumption) and was still fast enough to come just ahead of the Core i9 12900K Alder Lake processor. The Ryzen 7 7700 was at 96% the speed of the Ryzen 7 7700X and nearly matching the Core i5 13600K performance. The Ryzen 5 7600 lastly was at 96% the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X while tieing with the prior generation Core i5 12600K and the prior Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5900X. When factoring in the CPU power consumption of these "65 Watt" parts, the performance is all the more impressive especially compared to Intel's real power figures.

For those that have been waiting for lower-power, lower-priced AMD Zen 4 desktop processors to come to market, the new Ryzen 7600/7700/7900 parts are quite attractive with their performance capabilities and power efficiency. Thankfully DDR5 memory prices continue to improve as well as lower-cost AM5 motherboards plus these new 65 Watt CPUs also including heatsinks to help defray some costs. As long as you are on any modern Linux distribution from basically H2'2022 or newer, you should be in good shape for running the AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors.

The only Linux support caveat remains for software developers or those on the likes of Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux that really believe in tweaking out their systems, the AMD Zen 4 "znver4" compiler tuning support isn't arriving in stable form until GCC 13 and LLVM 16 in the March~April timeframe. But for all key/critical Linux support the AMD Zen 4 support has been ready since the original Ryzen 7000 series introduction.

Thanks to AMD and Intel for supplying their respective CPU review samples and stay tuned for additional follow-up Zen 4 Linux benchmarks on Phoronix.