AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

I have been very much enjoying my time testing out AMD's Zen 5 wares from the Ryzen AI 300 series to the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X were great for whetting my appetite while awaiting the Ryzen 9 9900 series. I had been very much enjoying them to the extent I was rather surprised myself last week when hearing of some reviewers not finding much excitement out of these new Zen 5 processors but typically those just looking at Windows gaming performance or running only a few canned/synthetic benchmarks. Following the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Linux testing when the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X arrived, they were put immediately to my gauntlet of hundreds of Linux benchmarks and indeed living up to expectations.

The Ryzen 9 9900 series is great for Linux content creators, developers compiling a lot of code, using any AI/HPC type workloads leveraging AVX-512, or even just running lots of Python scripts/applications and other workloads with nice generational uplift there. For those that may be tasking Ryzen for servers in small offices / home offices, the Ryzen 9 9900 series offers great performance there too across a wide variety of database and server workloads. The raw performance has been great and the power efficiency of Zen 5 continues to be very compelling.

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