AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Delivers Excellent Performance For Linux Developers, Creators & Technical Computing
For nearly 400 benchmarks here is the geometric mean across the very wide range of workloads tested. At a high level the Ryzen 9 9950X3D was slightly faster than the Ryzen 9 9950X but largely comes down to technical computing, code compilation, some creator workloads, and more where the 3D V-Cache with Zen 5 can really pay off. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D only widened the lead AMD has over the Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake flagship from Intel.
Generationally the Ryzen 9 9950X3D came out 25% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D overall making it still a very nice generational upgrade with being able to leverage the same AM5 motherboard and DDR5 system memory.
Here is the side-by-side of the Ryzen 9 9950X vs. 9950X3D for showing the areas where 3D V-Cache really is helpful:
Heavy hitting gains for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D in AI workloads like OpenVINO, TensorFlow, and Llama.cpp. HPC / technical computing workloads with ASKAP, easyWave, CloverLeaf, Incompact3D, SPECFEM3D, OpenFOAM, OpenRadioss, GROMACS, and more all benefited handsomely from 3D V-Cache. Some server workloads like the ClickHouse database and srsRAN all benefited a great deal too from the increased cache size. Beyond just gaming that is widely promoted as being a big winner with 3D V-Cache on Ryzen, there are many other workloads able to make great use of the expanded cache size on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
Making the Ryzen 9 9950X3D results even more compelling is that it had similar power consumption to the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 9950X processors. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D also had a similar CPU power consumption average to the Core Ultra 9 285K but with a much lower peak power consumption.
For those debating whether it's worthwhile upgrading from a Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7950X3D to Ryzen 9 9950X3D, here is a side-by-side against those metrics.... In workloads able to leverage the full 512-bit data path of AVX-512 with Zen 5, there were some wild generational improvements from Cryptsetup to OpenVINO and more. Tons of workloads with double digit percentage improvements upgrading from the generation-old Ryzen 9 7950X3D to the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
👁 AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D performed very well across many different Linux workloads and showed its huge potential for creators, developers, some server workloads, and more. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D is a great desktop processor and makes me all the more excited for the next AMD server processors with 3D V-Cache. Thanks to AMD for supplying the Ryzen 9 9950X3D review sample for launch day Linux testing at Phoronix. In the coming days I hope to be able to provide Ryzen 9 9900X3D Linux benchmarks so stay tuned for those 12-core X3D numbers.
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