Last month saw the first independent reviews and benchmarking of the latest chips from AMD, including the Ryzen 9 9950X and 9 9900X. Amongst all the reaction there’s no clear consensus on whether these CPUs are worth the investment. You’re always going to get a range of opinions - this is the internet, after all - but the 9000 series has been unusually divisive. We’ll get to why that is in a minute, but first let’s look at why this release has piqued our interest.
The good news
This very thorough 15-page benchmarking report from Phoronix sums it up best: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X Deliver Excellent Linux Performance. We're a hosting provider, so Linux performance is obviously what matters to us (and anyone with websites hosted on our servers). Linux underpins platforms like our Cloud Containers and High Performance Virtual Servers, so this is the news we had been hoping for.
If you are interested enough to read Phoronix’s report, Page 2 shows results from some of the tests that focused on Linux, and the conclusion confirms that the newer chips are a definite step up:
I ran nearly 400 benchmarks across all the CPUs. Taking the geometric mean of all the raw performance results, the Ryzen 9 9950X came out 17.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile was 21.5% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X across this wide mix of workloads. The Ryzen 9 9950X was 33% faster than the Intel Core i9 14900K performance overall and even the Ryzen 9 9900X was 18% faster than the Core i9 14900K. These are some great gains found with the Ryzen 9 9900 series.
In short, AMD have kicked another goal for hosting providers like us. The first Zen 5 chips handily outpace their Zen 4 equivalents and their Intel competitors.
We’re interested - very interested
Here at SiteHost, we’ll get our hands on some of these new models for our usual round of in-house testing as soon as we can.
Some other things are still falling into place, like an upcoming Linux kernel update that ought to further improve performance on these new Zen 5 chips. Every indication is that our happy history with Ryzen CPUs will continue.
We’ve blogged a lot of that history: Way back in 2018 we gave a cautious welcome to AMD as an emerging competitor doing innovative things. The next year the Ryzen 3000 family impressed us even more. Fast forward to 2023 and Ryzen processors were an important part of our big hardware refresh. A dig into many years of CPU benchmarking showed the big gains that the 7950X model, for example, provided over older hardware. Later, Ryzen 9s became a crucial component of our new High Performance Virtual Servers.
Why isn’t everyone so happy?
Why, then, have these new CPUs also received plenty of less enthusiastic coverage? Ars Technica’s review, for example, leads with “so-so speed boosts”, and PC World’s nuanced reporting called the launch “more complicated than you might think”. Their angle - eight things you need to know before buying - may sound like clickbait but actually makes sense.
The short story is that there are improvements in some but not all aspects of chip performance. Reviews and benchmarks from gamers, for example, have been underwhelming. And fair enough, too: the 9000 series isn’t delivering to the gaming community the same uplift that Linux-based hosts like us are getting. You can probably guess which one of those two groups is larger and louder online.
The big picture, and where to focus
There are two main conclusions to draw from the release of Ryzen’s 9000 series so far.
Firstly, there’s the near-truism that we’ve been saying a lot lately: New hardware outperforms old hardware. Especially over time periods of 2 or 3 years, hardware manufacturers are making massive strides. You can get bogged down in exactly where and by how much the 9000 series has risen the bar above the Ryzen 7000 series or Intel’s i9 chips. But the big picture matters more: smart investments in new hardware are a surefire way to deliver performance improvements. Sweating old hardware, even if it used to be top of the line, is no way to compete.
Secondly, it’s important to keep your eyes on what matters most to you. There are countless tasks that computing hardware can do, so there are countless ways to benchmark and compare things. Gaming PCs and Dedicated Servers are very different, so it’s no surprise that one series of chips can receive such different receptions from different audiences. Dig into the stuff that’s relevant to your case - and feel free to talk with us if you want some informed advice about hardware.
Our long-running approach to hardware has been to assess performance carefully, invest in proven gains, and roll out wins to our customers. The Ryzen 9000 series deserves our attention, and we’re looking forward to putting it at your service.