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

One of the workloads of interest to many Phoronix readers and also working out quite well for budget server use-cases is code compilation performance. Such as if assembling your own continuous integration (CI) / continuous delivery (CD) servers, using a Ryzen 9 7900 series processor can lead to a relatively affordable build system. The high clock speeds of the Ryzen processors work out well while the 16-core / 32-threads can deliver fast build times for even large code-bases. The Ryzen 9 7950X can build the Linux kernel in a default x86_64 configuration in under 40 seconds. Meanwhile the Xeon E-2388G at 8 cores or the Xeon E-2336 with 8-cores were only competing with prior generation Ryzen 5000 series parts. It's too bad Intel hasn't been able to deliver a "Xeon E-2400" series successor to these Rocket Lake processors for delivering an affordable, ECC-friendly server option.

Generationally the Ryzen 7000 series deliver a nice uplift over the Ryzen 5000 series. With the Ryzen 9 5950X for example it took 691 seconds to do an "allmodconfig" build of the kernel for including every possible kernel module. With the Ryzen 9 7950X that drops down to just 469 seconds while having the same number of cores/threads.

For those wanting to assemble an affordable build server, the AMD Ryzen 7000 series can be a great fit with the high clock speeds helping out especially when compiling smaller projects while the 16-cores / 32-threads at the top-end can still make quick builds for projects with many source files like the Linux kernel and Node.js.