Intel Core i9 9900KS Linux Performance Benchmarks
Across dozens of Linux benchmarks, it was certainly an interesting showdown between the Core i9 9900KS and Ryzen 9 3900X trading blows. For the workloads that didn't scale as well or favored higher clock frequencies, the Core i9 9900KS stole the lead, but for those workloads scaling well the Ryzen 9 3900X easily took the crown.
It was quite an interesting battle. And then the geometric mean of the 116 non-gaming benchmarks ran:
If taking the geometric mean of all those (non-gaming) results, the Core i9 9900KS was 14% higher over the Core i9 9900K. Unfortunately though that came up short still of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X performance with its geometric mean being just under 10% faster. Then again, Linux has more multi-threaded workloads typically speaking than Microsoft Windows, so it will be interesting to see how the Core i9 9900KS vs. Ryzen 9 3900X performance pans out there. Of course, the one area where the Core i9 9900KS did come out hands-down stronger on Linux was the gaming performance. So for gamers out there with current-generation Linux games at least, the i9-9900KS does deliver better performance while being more power efficient. The other area where the Core i9 9900KS now tended to win most often was in the Chrome/Firefox web browser benchmarks, but for there you generally don't need a Core i9 / Ryzen 9 if all you are doing is browsing the web. The other good news with the Core i9 9900KS besides the raw performance is improved hardware mitigations for Spectre V2 and MDS.
Stay tuned for more Core i9 9900KS Linux benchmarks in the coming days on Phoronix and thanks to Intel for providing the review sample for testing.
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