According to Phoronix, the current Linux 5.16 Kernel has provided a significant speed boost to AMD Ryzen APU customers. The recently released Linux 5.16 Kernel has been tested by Phoronix, and it appears that AMD’s Ryzen APU customers are in for a treat.
The tests were carried out on AMD’s Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U and Ryzen 5 5500 processors, which are based on the Zen 3 and Zen 2 architectures, respectively.
Different versions of the Linux Kernel were used to compare the gen-over-gen improvements and include:
- Linux 5.11 + Mesa 21.0.3
- Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.0.3
- Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.2.6
- Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 21.3.2
- Linux 5.15.10 + Mesa 22.0-dev
- Linux 5.16 + Mesa 22.0-dev
The Xonotic 0.8.2 build saw the most boost in performance, with a 28 percent improvement over Linux 5.15.10 running on Mesa22.0 build. The overall performance boost is roughly 5-10%, which is a significant improvement for owners of AMD Ryzen APU-based notebooks.
The other laptop with Ryzen 5 5500U also saw a performance boost, with up to a 14 percent increase in GLmark 2 and Xonotic, as well as a 7 percent increase overall.
This improvement with Linux 5.16 was fascinating and came unexpectedly. Linux 5.16 has many new features including AMDGPU kernel driver improvements, but this Radeon Vega graphics boost came as a surprise as there wasn’t any announced optimization and the Vega graphics support at this stage is quite mature. It may also be a combination of CPU-related improvements with Linux 5.16.
via Phoronix
This is fantastic news for AMD Ryzen APU notebook owners, as it appears that updating to the current Linux 5.16 Kernel is well worth it, as there are only benefits to be had. Other benchmarks don’t show a significant performance increase, but they also don’t show a performance decrease when compared to earlier Linux Kernels, so it’s a win-win situation for Ryzen owners. On the 9th of January, the Linux 5.16 Kernel is expected to be published in a stable state.
also read:
Here’s the new PassMark benchmark score of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX 64 core CPUs
