The Ryzen 7 1800X Linux Performance Evolution Since The AMD Zen Launch

I/O testing wasn't much of a focus for obvious reasons, but over the past two years the EXT4 performance has largely been flat. The exception though is for I/O workloads affected by the Spectre mitigations (and in the case of Intel, Meltdown too with KPTI by default). Thus in cases like SQLite they usually end up slightly slower than where they were pre-2018.

The Radeon RX 560 Polaris graphics card in this box saw much better performance with the latest Ubuntu packages than back in 2017... A majority of this has come from AMDGPU DRM kernel driver optimizations and RadeonSI/RADV Mesa improvements in user-space just in general being much faster. But in the case of RadeonSI as of recently there was some basic Zen optimizations put in place for better thread handling.

In some of the OpenMP scientific benchmarks, using the newest Linux stack yields better performance thanks to some Zen kernel optimizations as well as the GCC compiler improvements over the past two years, etc.

The Go language benchmarks are faster with their latest state except for the build performance that was adversely affected on Intel and AMD hardware by Retpolines due to Spectre V2.