After recently looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” Linux performance has evolved since launch, many Phoronix readers were curious how a similar launch-day vs. now comparison would look on the AMD Zen 5 side. The article today is looking at how the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux performance has evolved since their launch last year. These numbers are put alongside the prior Intel Arrow Lake results for additional context.
For those curious how the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux performance has evolved since their launch last summer, this article is for you with comparing those original Ubuntu benchmark results to where they are now on the recently released Ubuntu 25.04.
The Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X were both re-tested atop the updated Ubuntu 25.04 Linux operating system with the Linux 6.14 kernel, GCC 14.2, Mesa 25.0, Python 3.13, and other open-source software upgrades. The system was put back into its state as tested for the original launch-day testing with both CPUs on stock speeds, GSKILL 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics, and Corsair 2TB MP700 PRO NVMe SSD.
Here are the results for launch day versus now for both the AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors. In addition to the raw performance benchmarks were also the CPU power consumption numbers for reference on how the power efficiency has evolved over nearly the past year.
