AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Linux Performance After Three Years

Today marks three years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first HEDT chip sporting 64 cores / 128 threads. While based on Zen 2, the shear multi-threaded compute power of the Threadripper 3990X still bodes well today. Besides 64 cores / 128 threads still being a lot, Linux software improvements over the past three years have helped maintain the competitiveness of the Threadripper 3990X. In today's benchmarks are results from the System76 Thelio Major as tested back in 2020 based on Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the very latest state today when running an Ubuntu 23.04 snapshot on the same system and using a Linux 6.2 Git kernel.

Given the three anniversary of the Threadripper 3990X launch and the System76 Thelio Workstation still holding up very well after all this time of routine performance benchmarking, I wanted to run a fresh comparison for how well that 64-core HEDT Zen 2 system performs with the very latest Linux software compared to the Pop!_OS / Ubuntu 20.04 LTS state in early 2020.

The Threadripper 3990X has been running within the Thelio Major workstation, the beautifully-crafted system by System76 as the leading Linux PC vendor in North America. The Thelio chassis still looks as good now as it did back in 2023 and thanks to the power of this Threadripper setup with four channels of DDR4-3200 system memory, it still holds much use three years later. Thanks to System76 for providing this review sample and long-term testing of the Thelio Major that has proven to be a very reliable and built-well system.

Today's benchmarking is comparing the state of the Threadripper 3990X / Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS WIFI / Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics / 4 x 32GB DDR4-3200 / Samsung 970 EVO Plus with Pop!_OS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) compared to Ubuntu 23.04 in its current development form. As Ubuntu 23.04 hasn't yet moved to its new kernel version yet, I manually pulled in Linux 6.2 Git from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. All other system packages and settings were at their defaults.