Redesigned Thelio Major Elevates System76's All-AMD, Open-Source Linux Workstation: More Performance, Much Improved Thermals
The new System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X was compared to the prior generation Thelio Major with Ryzen Threadripper 7980X and then also the original Thelio Major powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. All workstations with 64-cores / 128-threads, 128GB of RAM, and AMD Radeon graphics for an interesting look at the performance evolution. All of these Thelio Major workstations were (re)tested atop Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.18 kernel and Mesa 25.2, COSMIC desktop, and GCC 13.3 compiler. Beyond looking at the raw performance the system thermals and power were also compared.
Even with the same core/thread count, the generational upgrade from the Threadripper 7980X to 9980X with the new Thelio Major led to a 15% build speed improvement for the default Linux x86_64 kernel build.
Not only was the build speed faster, but the new Thelio Major was running significantly cooler than the prior generation designs.
With building all the Linux x86_64 kernel modules, there was a much more pronounced time savings with the new Thelio Major. There was also significantly better thermal performance too.
Not only was the Threadripper 9980X much faster at building an allmodconfig kernel, but it was doing so with far greater energy efficiency than the prior generation workstations both at the CPU power level and also the overall AC "wall power" consumption for the entire workstation.
Across other code compilation workloads the trend continued of seeing very nice build speed improvements with the new Thelio Major while operating cooler and more power efficient.