APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

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Ryzen on Linux
It ticks all the boxes on paper, but how well is Ryzen supported, and how
well does it perform, on Linux? Jonni Bidwell fires up the APC test bench.
AMD being competitive with
Intel once again is an
exciting prospect. Free
market economics says that
should mean better performance
and prices for everyone, after all.
At least, once retailers have AMD
back in stock.
We’ve seen some impressive
benchmarks on the Windows side and
we’ve also seen a few shortcomings.
More precisely, we’ve seen a cheap chip
that does exceptionally well for
professional workloads such as video
transcoding. But also one that falters
a little when it comes to single-core
performance and serious gaming,
at least compared to Intel’s latest Kaby
Lake flagship, the 7700K. But how does
it work on Linux? And what of AMD’s
wider open-source strategy? Armed
with a few review samples, a fresh
install of Phoronix Test Suite and an
insatiable thirst for filling-in
spreadsheet data, we give Ryzen the
APC once-over.
In the official launch
announcement, its makers were keen
to extol its performance compared
to the top-of-the-line previous-gen
Broadwell-E chips. These match the
Ryzen 7’s 8-core/16-thread makeup,
but also cost well above the budget of
many a gaming enthusiast — the
top-of-the-line i7 6950X retails in
Australia for about $2,350. In many
ways, the 7700K is the more natural
BENCHMARKS
JetStream measures JavaScript
performance, but very much
depends on browser and JS
engine. Results with Edge on
Windows are closer to 250.
competitor. Sure, it has half as many
cores/threads, but multithreading is
hard for heterogeneous workloads
like gaming, so this won’t be much of a
detriment. The 7700K also happens
to cost significantly less than the
Ryzen 7 1800X that features in our
tests, so we shall make careful
comparisons between these two bits
of silicon, too. Benchmarking is a dark
art, and it’s worth keeping in mind
that Linux and Windows benchmarks
can differ wildly. Also worth
remembering is that new hardware
BENCHMARK AMD RYZEN 7 1800X INTEL CORE I7-7700K DIFFERENCE
LAMMPS (S) 29.3 26.7 -9%
FFTW (MFLOPS) 21,004 23,987 -14.2%
JOHN THE RIPPER (CRACKS/S) 12,996 12,004 7.6%
TTSIOD (FPS) 315 227 27.7%
GRAPHICSMAGICK (IT/MIN) 242 226 -6.6%
HIMENO (MFLOPS) 1,197 2,911 -143%
KERNEL COMPILATION (S) 77.4 101.5 31%
C-RAY (S) 8.1 19 134%
SMALLPT (S) 38 62 63%
STOCKFISH (S) 3.600 2.905 -19.3%
FLAC (S) 5.21 4.45 -14.6%
LAME (S) 9 8.5 -5.4%
FFMPEG (S) 13.5 7.4 -45.3%
OPENSSL (SIGNS/S) 1,149 839 27%
LIBJPEG-TURBO (MPIXELS/S) 180.1 193.7 -7.5%
BLENDER (S) 566.2 518.8 -8.4%
has teething issues — over the
coming weeks and months, we will
very likely hear tell of things that
don’t work as well as they should,
and of the resulting fixes.
Our first task was to get a working
test bed set up. Fortunately, we’d
already done this, using the aforesaid
top-of-the-line Ryzen 1800X CPU,
16GB of RAM and ASUS’s high-end
AM4 motherboard, the RoG Crosshair
VI Hero. We started with a fresh
install of Ubuntu 16.10, which
certainly booted and seemed to work.
However, we encountered spurious
segfaults during our kernel
compilation tests, which was odd,
because other tests worked OK and
the machine was certainly stable.
These went away when we used the
4.10 kernel from kernel.ubuntu.com,
but that caused other problems,
specifically that the Nvidia driver
doesn’t build against this, and we
neglected to mention that our
machine also had an Nvidia 1080 in
it. So rather than mess around with
ugly patching and manual installs,
we raided Zak Storey’s bountiful
cupboard and purloined a Radeon
470X. Since AMD added a lot of
Ryzen-specific code to Kernel 4.10
(some of it has been backported to
4.9), we figured we should stick with
this, but instead, we opted to use the
second beta of Ubuntu MATE 17.04
so that we could enjoy the general
refresh of system packages. As an
aside, we should mention that having
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