Core i9 7900X vs. Threadripper 1950X On Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos, Clear Linux
While we have already compared the Threadripper 1950X to the current top-end Core i9 7900X processor, today we are taking things a step further with our Threadripper Linux benchmarks by doing a side-by-side showdown when each system is tested across three different Linux distributions.
Here is a multi-way comparison when running the Threadripper 1950X and Core i9 7900X under Ubuntu 17.10 with its latest daily snapshot as of testing, Antergos 17.9 Rolling, and Clear Linux 17650. This provides a diverse look at the performance across distributions for these high-end desktop processors.
The AMD box was running with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X on the Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 motherboard, Corsair Force MP500 NVMe SSD, and 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory.
The Core X box was similar while using the Intel Core i9 7900X CPU on the MSI X299 SLI PLUS motherboard, Corsair Force MP500 NVMe SSD, and 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory.
No graphics/gaming tests were run for this comparison but strictly looking at the CPU performance across distributions.
Ubuntu 17.10 is currently making use of the Linux 4.12 kernel, GCC 7.2.0, and an EXT4 file-system. Antergos 17.9 has the Linux 4.12 kernel, GCC 7.2.0, and EXT4 too. Clear Linux has a similar makeup but they have already migrated to the Linux 4.13 kernel. On the CPU scaling driver front, it's worth noting that Antergos with Threadripper is defaulting to CPUFreq Schedutil while Ubuntu makes use of P-State Powersave for the Core i9 system. Clear Linux makes use of the performance governor on both systems. For anyone new to the Linux scene, Clear Linux is the Intel-developed distribution focused on delivering maximum performance whether it be via extra kernel patches to aggressive compiler flags by default; thus why we enjoy testing it for its many performance tweaks and does work on AMD hardware too, although that is not Intel's intended use-case/test or focus. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was also going to be used for testing, but with its current rolling kernel it was producing a kernel panic on the i9-7900X box.
All of these Linux processor benchmarks were facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite.