Benchmarks: AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Performance Boosted With Ubuntu 23.10
With Ubuntu 23.10 due for release on Thursday, I've been benchmarking a number of systems to look at the Ubuntu 23.10 performance against prior releases like Ubuntu 23.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Besides the open-source graphics driver performance for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics always being a stand-out improvement, one area that is particularly exciting with Ubuntu 23.10 is for those with newer AMD processors where there are some nice performance gains to find with this new Ubuntu Linux release. Here are side-by-side benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop along with an Intel Core i9 13900K desktop while testing Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS / Ubuntu 23.04 / Ubuntu 23.10.
The performance of Intel Raptor Lake on Ubuntu 23.10 has been largely flat while the AMD Zen 4 desktop is showing off a number of nice gains with this new Ubuntu 23.10 release compared to prior versions of Ubuntu Linux. One of the driving factors with Ubuntu 23.10 that benefit AMD desktops are Ryzen Zen 2 and newer systems with ACPI CPPC platform support are now defaulting to the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver rather than ACPI CPUFreq. This follows the upstream default change in Linux 6.5 with now Zen 2 and newer desktop CPUs (no change for EPYC servers) using AMD P-State EPP (active mode) with the powersave governor rather than ACPI CPUFreq with the Schedutil governor as was the prior default and what is used on the prior Ubuntu Linux releases.
With the AMD P-State default enabling and other recent improvements by AMD from Linux 6.2 to Linux 6.5, the new Ubuntu 23.10 release is performing quite nicely on the likes of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X. Plus for those using AMD Radeon graphics are also some very nice improvements to enjoy with Ubuntu 23.10's Mesa 23.2.1 graphics driver stack, which will be tested in a separate article on Phoronix.
Here are some initial benchmarks showing the Ubuntu 23.10 performance for both the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Core i9 13900K desktops. (Both CPUs were running at their reference frequencies. The reported clock frequency change on Ubuntu 23.10 is just due to a difference in how AMD P-State reports the base frequency relative to the prior ACPI CPUFreq sysfs interface.)