28-Way Linux CPU/System Comparison From Old To New
This week have been various unique and extra articles and benchmarks for commemorating the Phoronix 14th birthday. The latest of these fun articles is taking a look back at how various CPUs over the years compare to today's Intel Core and AMD Ryzen offerings.
Three years ago I did something similar with comparing the modern CPUs at the time to an old Intel Socket 478 system and power/performance compared to old NetBurst Celerons. This article isn't going back quite as far, but includes a much more diverse selection of hardware.
I unboxed most of the since retired Intel/AMD test systems that have seen better days and re-tested them using the latest Linux software stack to see how they perform now and compared to today's current Intel Skylake/Kabylake/Coffeelake and AMD Zen hardware.
It's quite a diverse range of hardware and basically used with what's available while mostly limiting it to low and high-end desktop hardware and foregoing any Xeon/Opteron/EPYC tests for this comparison, just desktop hardware for now.
And then compared those systems performance to many of the current systems racked up in the basement server room.
The software stack used for all of the systems was Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 but with manually upgrading to the Linux 4.17 kernel. Additionally, the "performance" P-State / CPUFreq scaling governor was enforced. Additionally, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS on each system were set to "-O3 -march=native" for building optimized binaries for each system under test as well as having upgraded to GCC 8.1. With the Linux 4.17 comes all of the relevant Spectre/Meltdown mitigation, which should be interesting particularly for some of these older systems.
The selection of processors that ended up being benchmarked included:
1: E-350
2: A6-7400K
3: A10-5800K
4: A10-7800
5: A10-7870K
6: Athlon II X3 425
7: FX-8350
8: Ryzen 5 2400G
9: Ryzen 5 2600
10: Ryzen 5 2600X
11: Ryzen 7 1700
12: Ryzen 7 1800X
13: Ryzen 7 2700
14: Ryzen 7 2700X
15: Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
16: Core 2 Duo E8400
17: Pentium G3258
18: Core i3 2100
19: Core i5 2400S
20: Core i5 7600K
21: Core i5 8400
22: Core i7 5960X
23: Core i7 7740X
24: Core i7 870
25: Core i7 8700K
26: Core i7 990X
27: Core i9 7900X
28: Core i9 7980XE
That selection was based upon the hardware as well as obvious time/resource constraints. Take the results as you wish, mostly it was driven out of my own personal curiosity and some fun benchmarking around the Phoronix anniversary. With that said, there are also obvious RAM/storage differences on some of the systems (as well as GPUs, though for this round of testing was basically all CPU focused).
Thanks to all of the benchmarking being driven in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite, you can easily compare your own Linux system(s) performance to all of the benchmarks found in this article. Simply install the Phoronix Test Suite on your Linux systems and then simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1806083-AR-PHX14CPUS04 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison to all of the data found in this article.