Ubuntu 20.04 LTS A Nice Upgrade For AMD Ryzen Owners From 18.04 LTS

Particularly for those on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or derivative distributions based on the current long-term support base, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next month will yield some nice improvements particularly for those on newer platforms like the AMD Ryzen 3000 series. Here are some benchmarks at how the Ryzen 9 3900X performance is looking between Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 19.10, and the current Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development snapshot.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is launching in April with the Linux 5.4 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.36, Mesa 20.0, GCC 9.3.0, and other updated software packages. It's a bit unfortunate they didn't go for Linux 5.5 (or even Linux 5.6 albeit that would have been a very tight fit with their schedule) but opted for Linux 5.4 given its an LTS kernel. But moving to Linux 5.4 compared to 5.3 on 19.10 or 18.04.4 LTS has some advantages, more so if you are still on an older hardware enablement stack of Ubuntu 18.04.

Especially for AMD Ryzen, moving from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 is also significant if you are compiling your own software. With the LTS upgrade is moving from GCC 7.5 to GCC 9.3 that now has Zen 2 (znver2) support in good shape where it wasn't present in GCC7 as well as better Znver1 support and newer Intel CPU targets too. The GNU C Library and other upgrades can also help out in the area of performance. On the graphics front, every Mesa version update tends to pay off and certainly significant even from Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04 LTS in going from Mesa 19.2 to 20.0.

I'll have out more benchmarks in April for the official Ubuntu 20.04 LTS debut while today are some benchmarks of the same system when comparing Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, 19.10, and a 20.04 snapshot. The system was an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS WiFi motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 Corsair memory, Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics.