AMD Threadripper 3970X Performance On Linux After Two Years

A few days ago it marked two years since the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X launched. While we are eager to see next-gen Threadripper, for now is a look at how the open-source Linux performance has evolved for these still-impressive HEDT processors by comparing the Linux performance at launch to where it is today with the very latest upstream Linux software.

This round of testing using the same hardware as in the launch-day review is seeing how the performance has changed when going from that Ubuntu 19.10 operating system stack at the time to now with Ubuntu 21.10 for the latest Linux support as well as additionally stepping ahead to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel.

This testing was on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-core processor that is still a great processor to this day and quite powerful especially for common Linux highly-threaded workloads.

Over the past two years there has been continued AMD Zen enhancements to the GCC compiler, countless Linux kernel optimizations some of which have been AMD specific while others just general performance enhancements, recent kernels now using ACPI CPUFreq with the "Schedutil" governor for leveraging scheduler utilization information rather than the prior default of Ondemand, and advancements in other prominent open-source software from Python, OpenMPI, and much more. So in marking the recent two year anniversary of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series launch, here are some fresh benchmarks on the same hardware showing how that Linux performance has changed over the course of two years.