Preview: AMD's FX-9590 Eight-Core At Up To 5.0GHz On Linux

A wide range of AMD and Intel hardware was used for this comparison. On the Intel side was the Pentium G3258, Core i3 4130, Core i5 4670, Core i7 4770K, Core i7 4790K, and Core i7 4960X. On the AMD side was the Athlon 5150, A6-7400K, A10-7800, A10-7850K, FX-8350, and then the FX-9590 that's the focus of today's reviews. The ASRock 990FX Killer motherboard was used with the FX-9590 and its water cooling setup.

For all testing there was 16GB of DDR3-2400MHz memory, 128GB Crucial SSD, and Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 graphics. The GPU was chosen due to using the Linux 3.17 Git kernel that's not yet compatible with Catalyst so resorting to the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver and thus choosing a mature and well-supported GPU even though the tests today aren't gaming focused. (There will be some FX-9590 Linux gaming focused tests later in the week with Catalyst on an older kernel.)

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was the software stack with the Linux 3.17 Git kernel, Mesa 10.4-devel, GCC 4.9.2 compiler, and an EXT4 file-system. For today's article all CPUs were tested at their reference settings. The stock CPU scheduler and other kernel settings remained at their 3.17 defaults.

All benchmarks were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite for automation and reproducibility. All of these benchmarks were built from source and for most of them using "-O3 -march=native" compiler flags with being built against each processor under test. Power consumption and thermal numbers for the FX-9590 will be coming in another more extensive article in the days ahead; stay tuned and consider these initial numbers as a preview for the FX-9590 Linux performance.