FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Refreshingly Well With AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X - Benchmarks Against Windows + Linux

For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.

It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 booting and running just fine with the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-core/64-thread processor from the ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME motherboard and all core functionality working including the PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage, onboard networking, etc. The system was running with 4 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory, 1TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics. It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 running well with this high-end AMD Threadripper system considering Linux even needed a boot workaround.

While the FreeBSD 12.1 experience was trouble-free with the ASUS TRX40 motherboard (ROG Zenith II Extreme) and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, DragonFlyBSD unfortunately was not. Both DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 stable and the DragonFlyBSD daily development snapshot from last week were yielding a panic on boot. So with that, DragonFlyBSD wasn't tested for this Threadripper 3970X comparison but just FreeBSD 12.1.

FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X was benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 8.0.1 compiler and again with GCC 9.2 from ports for ruling out compiler differences. The FreeBSD 12.1 performance was compared to last week's Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks with the same system.

All the Linux / BSD / Windows benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.