The Current Linux Performance On 22 Intel / AMD Desktop Systems
For your Linux benchmark viewing pleasure today are test results from twenty-two distinct Intel / AMD systems when running a recent release of the performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution and the hardware spanning from old AMD FX and Intel Core i3 Haswell CPUs up through the high-end desktop Core i9 and Threadripper processors.
It's quite a diverse range of systems being tested on Clear Linux 24870, which ships with the Linux 4.18.6 kernel, GCC 8.2.0, EXT4 file-system, Mesa 18.3-dev, X.Org Server 1.20.1, and other bleeding-edge packages while being tuned for optimal out-of-the-box performance. For these benchmarks they were mostly CPU/system performance focused. As a follow-up article on a sub-set of these systems will be a comparison of the Clear Linux performance to the current Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 18.10 development out-of-the-box speed.
This comparison was also driven for a few other reasons:
- As part of the quarterly Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic release dance, benchmarking a variety of cloud/embedded/desktop/server platforms for ensuring the Phodevi software/hardware abstraction layer is working as expected for device detection, ensuring all benchmarking functionality is in order, the automated LAN test orchestration via Phoromatic working as expected, etc. These tests were as part of that release verification process and Phoronix Test Suite 8.2-Rakkestad is now available.
- Curious about the current Intel/AMD performance on a diverse range of systems while using the latest Linux 4.18 stable kernel.
- Fun seeing how the latest CPUs like Threadripper 2 are comparing to old AMD FX and A10 Kaveri/Godavari era hardware.
- With the Phoronix Test Suite it's incredibly easy to see how your own Linux system(s) would compare side-by-side to the results in this article... It's simply a matter of installing the Phoronix Test Suite and in this case just executing phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1809129-PTS-CLEARLIN11 for your own automated benchmark comparison from start to finish with the automatic installation of dependencies, installation of tests, and the subsequent standardized execution of the applications under test. As another easy alternative is also the new phoronix/pts Docker benchmarking image also minted by the 8.2 release milestone.
The processors for this comparison included:
- Core i3 4130
- Core i5 4670
- Core i5 7600K
- Core i7 3770K
- Core i7 4790K
- Core i7 4960X
- Core i7 5775C
- Core i7 5960X
- Core i7 7700K
- Core i7 7740X
- Core i7 8086K
- Core i7 8700K
- Core i9 7900X
- Core i9 7960X
- Core i9 7980XE
- A10-7870K
- FX-8370E
- Ryzen 3 2200G
- Ryzen 7 1700
- Ryzen 7 2700X
- Threadripper 2950X
- Threadripper 2990WX
The selection of systems was used based upon what I had available and weren't busy running other benchmarks or activities. Across all 22 systems, a Crucial MX300 525GB SATA 3.0 SSD was used with the Clear Linux 24870 release. The Phoronix Test Suite also automatically rebuilds each test on each system for ensuring it's properly tuned for the CPU being benchmarked. The RAM and other system components obviously varied, but these results anyhow are mainly being served for reference figures and the reasons stated above. Clear Linux ships with all Spectre/Meltdown mitigations and the systems should be all on their latest BIOS/microcode.
Let's look at how these 22 very different systems compare with Linux 4.18 on Clear Linux.