AMD Ryzen 9 7950X & Intel Core i9 14900K: Ubuntu 22.04 vs. 23.10 vs. 24.04 Linux Performance

As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today’s focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.

Today’s Ubuntu 24.04 benchmarking for this “Noble Numbat” launch day is looking at both the Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while seeing how the performance has evolved since the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release as well as Ubuntu 23.10 as the interim release from six months ago.

In going from Ubuntu 23.10 to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the upgrade from Linux 6.5 to Linux 6.8, Mesa 23.2 to Mesa 24.0, GNOME 45 to GNOME 46 desktops, and an assortment of other package upgrades. The bump from Linux 6.5 to Linux 6.8 alone is enough to have a lot of performance changes depending upon the hardware and workload. Both Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS are making use of GCC 13.2 as the default system compiler.

Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS as the existing Long Term Support base has the hardware enablement stack (HWE) from Ubuntu 23.10 that includes Linux 6.5 and Mesa 23.2 while having the much older GCC 11.4 compiler, among other packages not upgraded in that prior LTS series.

Both the Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X were tested at their default speeds. Both the Intel and AMD systems were using the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, and 2TB WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD storage throughout all of the benchmarking. The system hardware didn’t change across any of the fresh Ubuntu Linux benchmarks but simply carrying out fresh installs each time of the relevant Ubuntu Linux release..

This desktop-focused Ubuntu 24.04 LTS testing complements the prior Ubuntu 24.04 laptop benchmarks against Windows 11, Ampere Altra server benchmarks, Intel Xeon server benchmarks, and more. I’ll have more Ubuntu 24.04 benchmarks across different hardware as time goes on.