AMD's monster 32-core Threadripper 2990WX CPU released this week to mostly positive reviews alongside a touch of criticism. When pitted against its closest Intel rival -- the Core i9 7980 XE -- it offers mostly superior performance and a clear value proposition, especially when tapping software that thrives on high core and thread counts. There's no question it stands as the world's fastest CPU.
But in several use-cases it's even faster if you're using it with Linux.
Phoronix has published a fascinating suite of benchmark results for AMD's Threadripper 2990WX that pit Windows 10 Pro against a handful of Linux distributions like Ubuntu and openSUSE. In almost every single test, Linux emerges as the winner. All of their CPU-intensive tests are compatible across Windows, Linux and MacOS and the same system was used with identical hardware settings.
The most extreme case shows all four flavors of Linux downright embarrassing Windows in a 7-Zip compression test (above), performing the task about twice as fast compared to Windows 10 Pro.
Ok, so creative professionals may not base their $1800 CPU purchase (or their OS choice) on the merits of file compression speed. This isn't to say it's not a damning result. Let's look at something more important, along the lines of 3D graphics pipelines with Blender.
Again, every Linux flavor bests Windows 10 by a healthy margin. This is just one of four separate Blender benchmarks which yielded roughly the same results.
The site also measured FLAC audio encoding (Linux won, but barely), H.264 video encoding (Linux won by a large margin) and a healthy assortment of other benchmarks.
Not tested: Adobe products. . .
But hey, this isn't an article encouraging you to maximize your investment by switching to Linux and potentially altering your workflow. Then again, professionals who can get the job done on Linux will be getting it done significantly faster.
That's because Windows has poor support for Non-Uniform Memory Access setups. The benefits of NUMA, however, are restricted to certain workloads. In discussing the Phoronix results, NotebookCheck observes the following:
"In all Blender tests, the performance on Linux was clearly better by at least 15% compared to Windows 10. However, in single-threaded tests such as FLAC Audio Encoding and BLAKE2, the Threadripper 2990WX performed almost equally across Windows 10 Pro and Linux. FFmpeg also favored performance under Windows 10 compared to most other Linux distros. Therefore, these results seem to indicate a scalability issue of Windows 10 Pro across the many CPU cores in heavily multi-threaded workflows."
I will obviously take this moment to point out that the selling point of Threadripper is its ability to chew up a workload with that extreme thread count. At this stage in the game, it's beyond clear that Linux extracts the best performance for those types of workloads. Probably not news to the Linux community, but it's an eye-opener for me.
If any of this piqued your interest, definitely check out the entire feature over at Phoronix, and stay tuned for his follow-up results as he's currently running another battery of tests.
