AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X & 7970X Linux Performance Benchmarks

For today's launch article I ran more than 120 benchmarks for this comparison. All of that data can be found in full via this result page including the individual power graphs, etc. If looking at the CPU power consumption across the entire duration of all the benchmarks conducted:

The Threadripper 7980X on average was consuming 288~298 Watts on average with a recorded peak of 358 Watts, just a hair above the 350 Watt TDP rating. The Threadripper 7970X power consumption on average came in at 268~281 Watt average depending upon EXPO setting and again peaking at 355~357 Watts. On the Intel side the Xeon Platinum 8480+ was hitting a 274 Watt average and a peak of 378 Watts while having the most power was the Xeon Max 9480 with a 294 Watt average and peak of 383 Watts.

Lastly is the geometric mean of all the benchmarks that were ran on all of the processors under test. With this collection of HPC benchmarks, creator workloads, code compilation, and other real-world threaded workloads, the Threadripper 7980X easily secured a first place finish. The Threadripper 7980X was 25% faster than the Xeon Platinum 8480+ with 8 channels of memory or came in at 31% faster when comparing to the Xeon Platinum 8480+ running at four DDR5 memory channels. The Threadripper 7970X meanwhile saw its geo mean align right with the Xeon Platinum 8480+, a processor that costs well north of $10k USD retail.

For those on an older HEDT platform like the 64-core Threadripper 3990X, the Threadripper 7980X proved to already be a very significant replace at nearly twice the performance. Thanks to AVX-512 with Zen 4, DDR5 memory, and all the other generational improvements made, the Threadripper 7000 series are a fantastic choice for creators and other workstation users with a budget to match.

The Linux support for the new Threadripper 7000 series was in great shape as we've seen across all the Zen 4 product families from various Ryzen 7040 series laptops up through AMD EPYC 8004/9004 series servers. The performance across multi-threaded real-world workloads has been nothing short of phenomenal.

The main downside of the Threadripper 7000 series is the upfront cost, especially if you remember more competitive pricing back during the early Threadripper days. Pricing information so far has been limited on the new Threadripper 7000 series motherboards, but given the professional feature set most of them are likely to come in above $1k USD. DDR5 memory pricing has come down over the past two years but DDR5 RDIMMs can still fetch a pretty penny. Plus there will be new kits coming to market with DDR5 RDIMM EXPO support, but as shown when running above DDR5-5200 there can be cases of slower performance in the very threaded workloads unless enabling PBO overclocking. The Threadripper 7000 series pricing though is still cheaper than building a similar Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processor, namely around the Xeon Platinum CPU pricing difference.

If prices are not an issue, the Threadripper 7970X and 7980X processors are fantastic options for creators and those other workloads able to effectively utilize the 32~64 cores / 64~128 threads. These are fantastic processors. Of all the benchmarks carried out, the lone area where Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" really had an advantage was with TensorFlow or other AI workload areas that are ready today to make use of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). With AMX in cases like TensorFlow the Intel Sapphire Rapids processors could outpace the AMD Threadripper 7000 series, but that was it. For software not making use of AMX, the Threadripper 7000 series delivered great generational uplift with AVX-512 and other Zen 4 enhancements.

For those wondering about (air) cooling with the Threadripper 7000 series, I have a separate article dedicated to that topic coming up in the next day or two. I also have some Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks and other interesting tests still to be published over the coming days.

Thanks to AMD for providing the Threadripper 7000 series hardware for launch-day Linux testing, it's been a true pleasure benchmarking these incredibly fast processors. But if the 7970X/7980X isn't fast enough for your workloads, go check out the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX review.