AMD Ryzen 9000 vs. Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake On Linux For Q1-2025 In ~400 Benchmarks
When looking at the wins and losses breakdown from 402 test cases, the Ryzen 9 9950X straight-up won 50% of the time with a first place finish. The Core Ultra 9 285K was the first place finisher 28% of the time and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D in first around 14% of the time with its 3D V-Cache. With a mix of single and multi-threaded workloads explored, in a handful of cases the Ryzen 9 9900X and other CPUs also won.
When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks tested on all of the CPUs, the Ryzen 9 9950X was the hands-down winner from this wide-reaching Linux performance comparison. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X was 18% faster than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K on average and even the Ryzen 9 9900X was 6% faster than the Core Ultra 9 285K. As of writing the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K was retailing for around $599 USD while the Ryzen 9 9950X can be found for about $560 USD!
The Ryzen 7 9700X meanwhile was 6% faster than the Core Ultra 5 245K. The Core Ultra 5 245K currently is retailing for $299 USD while the Ryzen 7 9700X goes for around $309.
On average across all the benchmarks conducted, the Ryzen 9 9950X had a CPU power consumption average of 148 Watts while the Core Ultra 9 285K had a 140 Watt average. Where the power consumption is concerning for Arrow Lake is on the top-end at peaking at 312 Watts compared to 210 Watts with the Ryzen 9 9950X. The Ryzen 7 9700X meanwhile consumed far less power than the Core Ultra 5 245K while enjoying better performance.
For those wondering if BIOS updates and/or the newest Linux kernel and other open-source software updates have changed the picture for Zen 5 vs. Arrow Lake, in relative terms it's similar to what we have seen in prior months. Albeit in some cases some healthy performance uplift at large thanks to the Linux software improvements. Those wanting to go through all ~400 benchmark results and power data in full can do so via this result page.
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