AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Make For Compelling Budget Servers, Leading Performance & Value Over Xeon E

In total I ran more than 250 benchmarks on each of these Intel/AMD processors under test on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Those wishing to see even more data beyond all the highlights in this article can see this result page.

If taking the geometric mean of all the results, here is the outcome of this server-focused AMD Ryzen comparison. With these server / creator / edge focused Linux workloads, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X was 1.48x the speed of the prior generation AMD Ryzen 9 5950X thanks to Zen 4 microarchitecture with AVX-512, DDR5 memory, and other improvements to make for a great showing at 16 cores / 32 threads. Even lower down the stack the AMD Ryzen 7 7600X was 1.37x the performance of the prior generation Ryzen 5 7600X.

Intel's Xeon E-2300 series Rocket Lake processors for having a similar core count processors, ECC memory support, and roughly similar pricing was simply not competitive to the Ryzen 7000 series. The Xeon E-2388G continues to be sold for more than the Ryzen 9 7950X while not being remotely competitive in terms of performance with just 8 cores / 16 threads nor in power efficiency. The Xeon E-2388G performance came out similar to a Ryzen 5 5600X while the Xeon E-2336 failed to even unseat the Ryzen 5 5500.

Here is a look at the CPU power consumption across the entire span of benchmarks conducted. For those wanting to build a low-profile AMD Ryzen server with a focus on power efficiency, the AMD Ryzen 7000 series 3D V-Cache (X3D) parts were tending to deliver the best performance-per-Watt.

Beyond the stellar performance of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series under Linux, the other compelling aspect and exciting generational improvement is having more Ryzen AM5-focused servers and motherboards available. From 1U server barebones like the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T accommodating any Ryzen 7000 series CPUs to mini-ITX ASRock Rack motherboards and then innovative products like the Supermicro Microcloud for Ryzen blades, there are more server-quality Ryzen options available this generation that support IPMI, ECC DDR5 UDIMMs, and other server-level features.

This ecosystem of AMD Ryzen 7000 series server offerings is terrific to see for those after more budget options, not needing the higher core counts provided with EPYC server CPUs, or looking at assembling lower-power, more edge-minded solutions. Or even those simply wanting a Ryzen 7000 series desktop with ECC memory support, there's a growing number of ECC-supported motherboard options.

Coming up for follow-up articles will be looking at ECC vs. non-ECC memory performance for the Ryzen 7000 series among other Linux benchmarks. Thanks to AMD and ASRock Rack for supplying the barebones platforms that made this testing possible.