For those wondering how the latest AMD Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 “Arrow Lake” desktop processors are battling it out on Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with the latest software updates as well as the newest system BIOS updates for a fresh, all-new look at these Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs on Linux.
Ahead of upcoming additional desktop CPU launches, I’ve been re-testing all of the AMD Ryzen 9000 series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 desktop CPUs I have available. This incorporates all of the recent Linux software updates since the AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake launches a few months ago as well as the new system BIOS and some new/updated workloads/benchmarks. An up-to-date look at the Intel and AMD desktop performance on Linux for mid-Q1 2025.
The current generation processors tested for this article based on the CPUs I had available included:
– Core Ultra 5 245K
– Core Ultra 9 285K
– Ryzen 5 9600X
– Ryzen 7 9700X
– Ryzen 7 9800X3D
– Ryzen 9 9900X
– Ryzen 9 9950X
Of course, soon it will be interesting to look at the upcoming Ryzen X3D parts and more on Linux.
All of these benchmarks were done on Ubuntu 24.10 compared to my original launch day testing on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. With Ubuntu 24.10 comes the GCC 14.2 compiler with Znver5 support and other improvements. The Linux 6.13 stable kernel was used as the newest stable kernel series at the time of testing. Corsair MP700 PRO PCIe 5.0 NVMe 2TB storage and 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory was used for testing along with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and liquid AIO cooling for the CPUs. Around 400 benchmarks were used ranging from common desktop applications like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox web browsers to image editing, audio/video encoding to various Linux server workloads and then also some graphics/gaming and a variety of other tested use-cases.
