Intel-optimized Clear Linux distro boosts AMD Ryzen 9 9950X performance by up to 16% over already decent Ubuntu gains

The latest Zen 5 desktop processors appear to be suffering from poor software optimization mostly on Windows, and, unfortunately, this can only be fixed with a major OS release, so most likely the solution could arrive with Windows 11 24H2 scheduled for October. Linux distros, on the other hand, do not seem to be affected by any optimization bugs. The majority of benchmarks performed on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS showed that AMD’s claims of 16% improvements over the Ryzen 7000X series are indeed accurate. But it looks like Ubuntu is not even the best optimized distro out there. Phoronix tested the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on six different distros and the Intel-optimized Clear Linux proved to boost performance by up to an additional 16% over Ubuntu.

Clear Linux integrates a series of X86-64 optimizations coded by Intel engineers that seem to be beneficial for non-Intel processors as well. While Phoronix has not used any games in this test, some of the benchmarks where Clear Linux is seeing significant performance boosts are also available on Windows and include ClickHouse, PyTourch, TensorFlow, PyPerfomrance and Zstd compression. Besides the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, the other distros tested were (descending performance order) CachyOS, Arch Linux, Fedora Workstation 40 and Ubuntu 24.10 August 19 build.

It is still unclear what happened to the desktop Zen 5 launch. From the 2-week delay rumored to be caused by binning problems, to the parked core issues in Windows and the staggered X870 motherboard launch, the desktop Zen 5 launch appears to be one of the biggest fumbles coming from AMD in recent years. Perhaps Team Red could focus more on solving compatibility issues seeing that its Zen 5 optimizations average 5% gains in Windows, whereas Intel's Clear Linux optimizations introduced can collaterally boost AMD’s performance by up to 32% over the previous generation.

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