AMD Ryzen 5 9600X & Ryzen 7 9700X Offer Excellent Linux Performance Review

This could quite well be my simplest review in the past twenty years of Phoronix. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel’s 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.

The past two weeks I have been eagerly running many benchmarks of AMD Zen 5 on Linux with Strix Point via the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with great results. That was fun, but now with Zen 5 desktop processors in hand, the benchmarking has been wild. Ahead of tomorrow’s Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X availability, the review embargo on these processors lifts today. It’s not until next week for the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X availability and review embargo lift.

Given there were already the prior embargo lifts on the AMD Zen 5 client products and Zen 5 architecture details, today’s review is squarely focused on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X products.

The Ryzen 5 9600X as a reminder is a 6-core / 12-thread Zen 5 processor with 3.9GHz base clock and 5.4GHz boost clock while having a 32MB L3 cache and a 65 Watt TDP rating. This processor is launching tomorrow at $279 USD… While the prior gen Ryzen 5 7600X today retails for around $200~220, back when it launched that Zen 4 6-core part was priced at $299 USD. So seeing the Ryzen 5 9600X launch less at $279 is rather competitive. The Intel Core i5 14600K competition meanwhile is priced at $299~339 USD as of writing.

The Ryzen 7 9700X meanwhile is the 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5 desktop processor with a 3.8GHz base frequency, maximum boost clock of 5.5GHz, 32MB L3 cache, and a 65 Watt TDP. The Ryzen 7 9700X is launching at a suggested price of $359 USD. This too is priced very well considering the prior gen Ryzen 7 7700X launched at $399 USD and the Intel Core i7 14700K competition is priced at $399~419 USD.

With the pricing covered, that leaves the two other main areas for the Phoronix focus: the Linux support and the performance.

When it comes to the Linux support for the Ryzen 9000 series, you should be in good shape with modern Linux distributions. With the Ryzen 9000 series working with existing AM5 motherboards after BIOS upgrade, there isn’t any new platform kinks to really worry about or other Linux compatibility problems there. As I’ve shown in my several AMD Ryzen AI 300 series articles, the Zen 5 core support is in order. With the Ryzen 9000 series it’s also simpler than with Strix Point given that there is the older cut-down RDNA2 integrated graphics if using the integrated graphics/display on the desktop CPUs and these are all full Zen 5 cores without any mix of Zen 5 and 5C.

All of the core support for the Ryzen 9000 series is good for end-users running the Ryzen 9000 series on modern distributions like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Fedora 40, Arch Linux, etc. There are a few caveats to note. First, while not relevant to most of you, if planning to use any RAPL/PowerCap sysfs monitoring the CPU power consumption that sadly isn’t yet mainlined for Zen 5… Rather silly, but a one line patch is needed that hasn’t yet been upstreamed to add Family 1Ah to the PowerCap RAPL driver. It’s sad that this one-liner wasn’t merged months ago especially with the new Family ID for Zen 5 being known for months. But without this one line patch, you won’t be able to enjoy any energy reporting for the CPU… Thus for my benchmarking of the Ryzen 9000 series I had to patch my kernel build. If you are on Linux 6.9+, you’ll also need this patch to fix the AMD RAPL package energy counter scope. But again this isn’t a feature used by the masses and for my purposes only ever of interest during benchmarking for power consumption monitoring and performance-per-Watt measurements. But frustrating nevertheless that the one line patch wasn’t upstreamed months ago as part of the rest of the Zen 5 code but seemingly overlooked.

The other minor blemish for the AMD Zen 5 support is on the compiler side. AMD did get the Znver5 target added for GCC 14.1 stable that released back in April. Though it would have been even better if the support actually was out last year for GCC 13 given the annual release cadence and the likes of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS using GCC 13, not GCC 14. Intel typically does the better job here of trying to get their ISA enablement and new CPU targets added into the open-source compilers well ahead of release to avoid timing/alignment issues like this. But getting the Znver5 target into GCC 14 is at least better than sometimes where there hasn’t been the support in a released compiler at launch day. But… Znver5 isn’t yet in the LLVM/Clang compiler codebase. As of writing there is no Znver5 support upstreamed into the LLVM/Clang compiler. That’s disappointing months after the GCC support was upstreamed. There is an imminent timing issue there as well with LLVM Clang 19 releasing in September and no Znver5 support yet. We’ll see if it gets added and back-ported to the v19 release branch in the coming weeks or not.

So there still are some AMD Linux enablement quirks where they could improve upon for seeing better software support on launch-day, but for those not worrying about RAPL/PowerCap energy monitoring or spinning tuned-out binaries catered to Zen 5, the Linux support overall is in great shape for the Ryzen 9000 series.