Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today i have a quick benchmark video for you and due to popular request we're looking into thread ripper 2990 WX performance using linux so first time ever testing linux for us apparently that was something we should have done on day one according to many AMD fans despite the fact that we've never done it I'm ranting anyway rather than just testing up AMD's new 32 core processor I'll be testing it against the core I 979 ATX II as well for reference so we have the thread Ripper 2990 WX versus Cora 9 79 80 XE using both Windows 10 and Linux in this case the aboon - eighteen point four point one LTS both operating systems were tested in their error box configuration so no optimizations were made both test systems have been configured with 64 gigabytes of ddr4 memory the 2990 WX is limited to 3000 while these 79 80 XE will happily accept 3200 or you could go higher than that but for the sake of trying to keep these things sort of apples to apples we've settled with a low latency CL 14 ddr4 3200 memory okay let's get to the results M Queens as part of the fir onyx test suite and it's one of the few benchmarks in that suite that I could get to work on both Linux and windows as well as AMD and Intel hardware I have to admit the test suite was a bit of a nightmare to work with there's basically zero documentation on what the benchmarks do or how they work and I was just as I said difficult to get a lot of them to work anyway this particular benchmark measures the time to solve the end Queen problem and M Queen just uses a larger board making it a longer more complex problem here we're measuring the time to solve and as you can see the 2990 WX does this and around half the time of the 79ad XE using either Windows or Linux which is extremely impressive stockfish is a free open-source chess engine available on various platforms and it's consistently ranked as one of the best chess engines and is the strongest open-source chess engine in the world the speed of this test is measured in nodes essentially positions per second and this is determined entirely by the processes performance again we see when it comes to chess the 2990 WX is a beast using either Windows or Linux that said this time we do see a 23 percent performance uplift for the 32 core processor when using Linux meanwhile under the same test conditions the 79a exe only saw a 4% performance increase the last chess benchmark we're going to look at is crafty and again we're measuring performance in nodes per second interestingly the core I 979 ad XE wins out here and so the biggest performance uplift we're moving to Linux a 5% performance increase was seen opposed just a 3% increase for the 2990 WX and this made the Intel CPU 12% faster overall John the Ripper is a password cracker that's currently available on multiple platforms including Linux and Windows using the traditional data encryption standard we see the 2990 WX and 79-80 XZ execute roughly the same amount of crypts per second when using Windows however when using Linux it's a completely different ballgame here the 79 80 XE was a whopping 80 percent faster but it's the 29th 90 WX that's truly impressive delivering three times more performance making it roughly 80 percent faster than the core I 9 we also find a similar story when using the Blowfish cipher here the 79 80 XE is 7% faster on Windows but the 2990 WX is almost 70 percent faster when using Linux so while the 32 core processor looks less than impressive using Windows 10 it looks incredible using Linux graphics magic is a simple but highly efficient software package for viewing and manipulating images it supports a massive range of formats an image processing is heavily multi-threaded it's used by several websites to process large numbers of uploaded images and here we're looking at these sharpened performance which is measured in iterations per minute so higher is better using Windows 10 the 79-80 XE is 26% fast in the 2990 WX however using Linux turns that around and now the 32 core processor is 10% faster not a massive win but the AMD processor does come from well behind on Windows to beat the core I 9 on Linux the enhanced operation performs around 30% better Linux but we do see similar games for both the AMD and Intel processors and the end result is a minor win for AMD next up we have the Apache benchmark which measures the performance of HTTP web servers and as you can see the performance is extremely poor on Windows 10 I should note that the server edition of Windows does fare a little better but still gets smashed about by Linux which is why most web servers run Linux anyway on Windows 10 the 78 exe was 4% faster than the 2990 w.x but on linux the 18 called process was almost 40% faster so not a great result here for the 32 core processor we've seen previously that encoding performance isn't a particular strength of the 2990 w.x and we see that again here as the 79ad XE was 6% faster and using windows and having said that it really wasn't much better with Linux either the 70 or 80 XE was still able to edge out a 32 core processor so for encoding workloads Linux appears to do little to help out the 2990 WX the 2990 WX also sucked in our veracrypt benchmark and we find these same odd results with linux for the 50 megabyte test the 2990 WX was slightly slower than the 79ad XE when using Windows 10 that said we see when compared to the performance results on Windows 10 links actually tanks performance particularly for the 79 80 XE but where the 2990 WX really struggled on windows was for the memory intensive one gigabyte test here offered half the performance of the 79 80 XE this result was improved on Linux but even so the 79 80 XE was still 35% faster so the one gigabyte results are roughly what we're expecting a fine but I'm not quite sure what's going on with the 50 megabyte results for Linux though I also found some odd results using 7-zip on Linux as well for example the 2990 WX is exceptional decompression performance seen on Windows was reduced by 13% when using Linux the 79ad XE also syrup haunts drop-off though it was very minor compression performance for the 2990 WX was drastically improved here we see a massive 54% performance uplift that said the 7080 XE also enjoyed a performance boost that was a much smaller 10% inquiry still this meant overall the 78 exe was still 11% fast in the 2990 WX last up we're going to have a look at the blender open data benchmark suite and I'm expecting pretty positive results here for the 2990 WX given what we've already seen in Windows here we have the barbershop interior test and we're measuring completion time in seconds the 79-80 XC was 23% faster using linux while the 2990 WX plus 31 percent faster this meant while the 2990 WX was 21% faster the 79ad XE on Windows it's now 29% faster using Linux we see a slightly different scenario with the BMW 27 test though the outcome still sees the 2990 WX well ahead still where is the 32 core processor was 52% fast using Windows 10 that margin was reduced to 45% with Linux this time we see similar scaling using either CPU both were 48 percent faster using Linux for the classroom workload this time a Linux slightly favored the 2990 WX making at 59 percent faster whereas it was 52% faster on Windows we see a very similar story here Linux lightly improves the 2990 wxs position but overall both CPUC good gains on Linux then we have the pavillion Barcelona workload and we see more of the same so time to wrap things up so is Windows 10 gimping the thread Ripper 29 and 90 WX s performance unquestionably yes but it is also gimping the 79ad XE to a certain degree as well and this is really important to note because if you were to compare just the 2990 WX it's performance of Windows to Linux the situation would appear much more extreme than it really is for example you would conclude that the 32 core processor is going to wreck the 79 80 XE and by an even more extreme margin when carrying out any kind of rendering tasks but really both CPUs see an almost identical performance uplift meanwhile programs that were problematic on Windows such as 7-zip and veracrypt for example well they still provided mixed results when using Linux for example a 2990 WX is compression performance was strengthened but decompression performance was weakened still overall linux did provide a better balance though having said that we could still at times see the impact the multi die design has and the limited balance let's say and that was seen in seven zip compression again although I am reporting the average result of that test the test does start very high and then keeps coming down as it runs more and more iterations of the test whereas the 79-80 XC produces pretty much the same score on every single run so we are still seeing that sort of inconsistent performance that jumps all over the place till things are worked out but anyway in the end the average performance does end up being a lot better on Linux even on Linux the encoding performance was still a bit lackluster it has to be said though I have only managed to do very limited testing so far as spend on memory sensitive workloads like the blender renders the 2990 WX woes are based and this also includes the chess and password cracking benchmarks for example so again depending on what you plan on use in the 2990 wx4 will determine just how useful it really is still there's clearly some serious Windows 10 optimizations that will need to come in order to better utilize or a better manage these core heavy CPUs I should just note though that improved thread scheduling isn't going to make the 2990 WX a weapon and workloads where it is clearly struggling but it is our hope that it can at least match the 2950 x under those conditions rather than come in much slower results like what we're seeing in the graphic magic sharpened tests were promising as the 2990 WX went from being a much slower than the 79 80 XE on Windows to slightly faster with Linux and we saw the same thing with John the Ripper still I realize this is only a small sample of applications and doesn't really do much for content creators like myself I'd love to test out Adobe Premiere on Linux to see if my custom warp stabiliser test running a dozen instances simultaneously provides better results our Windows this test does manage to max out the 2990 WX but the resulting performance is very poor wrapping this one up I have to say the few days that I spent mastering our Linux was interesting but ultimately made me much more appreciative of Windows 10 as a desktop OS it's just world's better at least in my opinion and well I suppose that's hardly surprising if that wasn't the case a lot more a PC enthusiast would be using Linux so for now all we can do is keep our fingers crossed for a Windows Update that improves performance for these core heavy CPUs and that is going to do it for this one if you enjoy 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