AMD Ryzen CPU Core Scaling Performance

Curious how Ryzen scales across its CPU cores? Here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks testing a Ryzen 7 1700 with different core counts.

The MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM motherboard used for our Ryzen 7 testing thus far offers a new "downcore control" feature for adjusting the number of enabled cores/threads. The options exposed for the Ryzen 7 1700 (and 7 1800X) with this downcore control are:

AUTO
TWO (1 + 1)
TWO (2 + 0)
THREE (3 + 0)
FOUR (2 + 2)
FOUR (4 + 0)
SIX (3 + 3)

For seeing how Ryzen scales up across its cores with different workloads, I benchmarked all of these options while running various multi-threaded Linux benchmarks. BIOS 117 is the latest at the time of testing for this particular board.

The Ryzen 7 1700 with Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 and the Linux 4.10 kernel was used for all of our benchmarking. The same system was used with the Ryzen 7 1700, MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM, 16GB DDR4 memory, Intel 600p NVMe SSD 256GB, and Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury. Ubuntu 17.04 had Linux 4.10, Mesa 17.0, GCC 6.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.