AMD Threadripper 2950X Offers Great Linux Performance At $900 USD

Of course, not all desktop/workstation workloads are multi-threaded... In the single-threaded FLAC audio encoding test, the 2950X is still faster than the 1950X given the higher clock speeds, memory/cache latency reductions, and other Zen+ improvements, but the Intel Kabylake/Coffeelake CPUs here are able to show their upper-hand of greater instructions per clock.

The Threadripper 2950X continues showing off its 32-thread dominating performance at under $900 USD.

OpenSSL is an interesting test case as while years ago it favored AMD CPUs, recent generations of Intel micro-architectures have had the advantage. With the Threadripper 1950X vs. i9 7900X the performance was similar while now with the 2950X the performance is in AMD's favor by a 10% margin.

Not that you would want to run a production PostgreSQL database server on this high-end desktop processor, but curiosity got the best of me for seeing how well this Zen+ 16-thread/32-core CPU would cope with the workload.... It's competitive with i9-7900X and will be interesting to see how much better the performance is when the next-generation EPYC server processors launch next year based upon 7nm "Zen 2."