6-Way Linux Distribution Comparison On AMD's Ryzen

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was leading in many benchmarks, but it wasn't leading in PostgreSQL, due to its usage of XFS+Btrfs. The fastest PostgreSQL database server results were a close run with Antergos 17.3 and Debian 9.0 on EXT4.

Clear Linux came out in the lead with the Redis database server, but it was a close race with the other distributions.

Ubuntu 17.04 was virtually tied with openSUSE Tumbleweed followed by Antergos for the Blender 3D software benchmark.

What was most surprising about these tests with the AMD Ryzen 7 across different Linux distributions is that openSUSE Tumbleweed did very well. Normally we don't see openSUSE Tumbleweed being so competitive in testing compared to other modern Linux distributions, but with the Ryzen 7 1800X it had a number of first-place finishes. This is possibly due to openSUSE being better optimized for AMD hardware: AMD has a long history of collaboration with SUSE, SUSE working on AMD HSA and related support in GCC among other compiler work for AMD, AMD having contracted SUSE for the RadeonHD driver development, and more. I haven't seen anything Ryzen-specific improvements made by openSUSE Tumbleweed, but those interested can dig deeper and share any discoveries in the forums.