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

With GraphicsMagick and its OpenMP multi-threading for this open-source imaging program, the FX-9590 was performing between the Haswell Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs for the image sharpening test. The FX-9590 was 17% faster than the FX-8350.

The Core i7 4960X Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition CPU is likely coming in behind the Core i7 Haswell desktop CPUs due to the architectural differences and GraphicsMagick tending to take full advantage of all available instruction set extensions when built from source.

The FX-9590 could build the Linux kernel from source in just over a half minute, which came in right behind the Core i5 4670.

Hopefully these FX-9590 results were insightful if you are interested in a high-end AMD eight-core CPU. The FX-9590 is certainly compelling if you have workloads that just seek high clock speeds but for many of these Linux benchmarks the FX-9590 performance was coming in around the speed of a Core i5 Haswell processor; it's too bad that the AMD FX-Series is still Piledriver-based rather than Steamroller for better competing with Intel's Haswell processors. Overall though the FX-9590 was running fine on Linux with no incompatibility problems given that the Piledriver micro-architecture has already been supported within the GCC compiler and that AMD Vishera CPUs have been available and supported by Linux for some time.

You can find more of these preview Linux benchmark results via OpenBenchmarking.org while as mentioned already more extensive testing that will look at overclocking, power consumption, thermal performance, and other Linux metrics will be published in the days ahead.