AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X & 7970X Linux Performance Benchmarks
Another significant change with these new Threadripper processors besides the transition to DDR5 is that DDR5 Registered memory is now a requirement. Only DDR5 RDIMMs are now supported with the Threadripper processors. Some DDR5 RDIMM vendors will also be making available kits that support AMD EXPO for allowing higher memory speeds. One important bit that came up during my testing is that for some multi-threaded workloads, running without EXPO can actually be beneficial. This is because when the memory is at DDR5-5200 or lower, the power management firmware can ramp down the DFP state on core centric workloads to free up more VDDSOC and VDDIO power. That extra power can then be consumed by the CPU cores to help benefit threaded workloads. But at speeds greater than DDR5-5200, the VDDSOC will remain at 1.2V consistently and no opportunistic powersaving. So just be aware of that caveat when deciding between DDR5 RDIMM kits if you don't plan on using PBO overclocking. For the benchmarks today I completed them both at DDR5-6400 EXPO and DDR5-4800 defaults for reference.
The Threadripper 7000 series review kit provided by AMD included the Ryzen Threadripper 7970X, Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI motherboard, GSKILL ZEETA R5NEO 4 x 32GB DDR5-6400 EXPO DIMMs, and NZXT Kraken 360 water cooling system. Thanks to AMD for making this launch day Linux testing possible.
The ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI is a feature-packed Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series motherboard with supporting up to 1TB of ECC DDR5 RDIMMs, 36 power stages, three PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, 10Gb and 2.5 Gb LAN ports, three M.2 slots, rear USB 20Gbps Type-C, SlimSAS NVMe support, IPMI remote management support, and rated for 24/7 operation. This is an extremely feature-packed motherboard even for Threadripper standards.
The Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI motherboard pricing has yet to be officially confirmed and should be available in retail channels before the end of the year.
To little surprise given how well the AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs have been working under Linux along with the AMD EPYC 9004 and EPYC 8004 series processors, the Zen 4 Threadripper processors and the platforms I've tested so far (the ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI and then the HP Z6 G5 A for the PRO 7995WX testing) have been working well on modern Linux distributions like Ubuntu 23.10.
Most of my Linux testing thus far has been with Ubuntu 23.10 on Linux 6.5 but have confirmed Fedora Workstation 39 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS also in good shape. If you are running on a modern Linux distribution with a recent kernel, you should be in good shape. There may be some caveats like around wired/wireless networking on some of the new motherboards and any other extra features specific to particular motherboards, but at large the Threadripper 7000 series support for Linux should be in great shape. Though again not a big surprise given the Zen 4 CPUs working great from desktop to server already the past year.