It appears that the Linux 5.16 kernel benefits AMD Ryzen processors, at least the APU. Testing shows that the performance gain is in the range of 30%.
At least that’s what a recent study from Phoronics announced. The tests conducted were focused on the performance of Ryzen APUs in a Linux environment. The conclusion is promising with the 5.16 kernel. Our performance has increased by 28% compared to the 5.15 kernel.
This boost has been seen with Xonotic games and 4K definition and basic settings. Other games and benchmarks confirm the improvement in performance. On the other hand, we’re on a slightly less optimistic advantage. They average between 10 and 20%.
Linux 5.16 Kernel and AMD APU Performance
The tests were done with a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop computer equipped with a Cezanne Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U APU. This chip provides eight physical cores and 16 logical cores. The same trend is seen with previous generation APUs such as the Ryzen 5 5500U (also put to the test). The latter is also part of the 5000 series mobile APUs but uses the Zen 2 and not the Zen 3 architecture.
At the moment there is no clear explanation for this increase in performance. We can speculate that these are probably the result of a combination of specific adaptations. the report states
“This improvement seen with the Linux 5.16 kernel was fascinating and unexpected. Linux 5.16 has many new features including improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver, but this Radeon Vega graphics boost came as a surprise as no optimizations were announced and Vega graphics support is quite mature at this point. . It could also be a combination of processor-related improvements.”
It will be interesting to see if the same result is expected with the next Rembrandt APU.
Prone to fits of apathy. Music specialist. Extreme food enthusiast. Amateur problem solver.