AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance

In total I ran nearly 400 benchmarks in full across these new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X desktop processors along with all of the re-testing over the summer of the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen and Ryzen 5000/7000 series. Those wanting to see all 387 benchmarks along with the associated power and performance-per-Watt metrics can find all the data via this result page.

When taking the geometric mean of those nearly 400 raw benchmark results, it sums up the greatness of Zen 5 with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors. The Ryzen 7 9700X delivered 1.195x the performance of the Core i5 14600K competition or 1.15x the performance of the prior generation Ryzen 7 7700X. The Ryzen 5 9600X came in at 1.35x the performance of the Core i5 14500 and 1.25x the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X. Or if still on Zen 3 for comparison, the Ryzen 5 9600X was 1.82x the performance of the Ryzen 5 5600X.

The raw performance of these Ryzen 9000 series processors was extremely impressive. These new Zen 5 desktop processors showed significant uplift in areas such as gaming and single-threaded workloads commonly led by Intel like Python, NumPy, Cryptsetup, audio encoding, and web browser performance. The Zen 5 generational uplift also showed great strides in even better AVX-512 performance for helping more AI workloads to a lot of other strong finishes in technical computing and HPC workloads. Whether you are just a heavy web browser user and running lots of Python scripts to doing a lot of creator workloads and software development, Zen 5 is an exceptionally well rounded design. The performance of the Ryzen 9 9900 series and upcoming EPYC Turin server processors should be a real treat given what we are seeing out of these Zen 5 6-core and 8-core desktop parts.

The raw performance results alone were impressive for this big Linux desktop CPU comparison but it's all the more mesmerizing when accounting for the CPU power use. On average across the nearly 400 benchmarks the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were consuming 73 Watts on average and a peak of 101~103 Watts. The Ryzen 5 7600X meanwhile had a 92 Watt average and a 149 Watt peak while the Ryzen 7 7700X had a 99 Watt average and 140 Watt peak. The Core i5 14600K with being a power hungry Raptor Lake had a 127 Watt average and a 236 Watt peak. The power efficiency of these Zen 5 processors are phenomenal!

The CPU performance and power efficiency of the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X were truly impressive and rounding out the offering was good Linux support and competitive pricing. The Ryzen 5 9600X at $279 USD and the Ryzen 7 9700X at $359 USD are priced lower relative to their Zen 4 counterparts launch pricing and very compelling compared to the Intel competition. The pricing is also great with the Ryzen 9000 series processors working on existing AM5 motherboards after a BIOS upgrade and thus a nice upgrade path and/or a nice and robust selection of motherboards already in the marketplace at varying price points if this is your first leap onto AM5. For those that sat out the Ryzen 7000 series, the Ryzen 9000 series offer tremendous performance and power potential plus with DDR5 memory prices having subsided it's now a much better time to invest into the new platform.

As noted the Linux support at launch for the Ryzen 9000 series is in great shape besides needing the RAPL/PowerCap support if you care about CPU power monitoring and then also AMD still having yet to upstream the LLVM/Clang Znver5 target.

All in I am very impressed with these initial AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors. Stay tuned for more Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarks in the days to come in looking closer at the AVX-512 improvements, DDR5-6000 vs. DDR5-8000 memory performance, and other benchmarking to look closer at other Zen 5 changes. Thanks to AMD for supplying the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors in advance of today's embargo lift.

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