AMD Ryzen 7000 it’s here to compete with Intel’s Raptor Lake generation. While the performance and temperature tests take center stage, perhaps the biggest surprise comes from the front Linuxwhere according to tests conducted by Phoronix, keeping Specter V2 mitigations improves performance compared to disabling them, which is really surprising.

Meltdown and Specter came out right at the beginning of 2018 and appeared like elephants in china. The first, which mainly affected Intel processors, could be definitively solved in exchange for a loss of performance, but the second, which also affected AMD and ARM processors, is intractable, forcing the accumulation of mitigations at the kernel level, the operating system, processor microcodes, drivers and even and applications, all with the aim of minimizing the chances of successful attacks.

In addition to limiting attacks, another consequence of using Specter-like vulnerability mitigations is a loss of performance, so Phoronix’s finding of running Linux on Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) is quite a surprise.

Michael Larabel, head of Phoronix and lead developer of the eponymous benchmarking suite, tested the model for the first time Ryzen 9 7950Xand after not believing what he saw he decided to do more tests with sa Ryzen 5 7600X to find that this was the case, with processors performing better with default settings than with Specter V2 mitigations disabled.

At Phoronix, they used an ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO motherboard with BIOS 0604, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus drive and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with slightly modified Linux 6 kernel.

Michael Larabel explains that “disabling mitigations helped in a small subset of tests, mainly in various synthetic kernel tests. OpenJDK Java workloads, database workloads, web browser tests, and many other workloads normally negatively affected by Specter mitigations actually performed better on this Ryzen 5 7600X system than when mitigations were disabled.“. On the other hand, the same person in charge of Phoronix remembers it Ryzen 700 is not affected by most of the vulnerabilities found in processors in recent years.

It is important to keep in mind that what Phoronix has done are synthetic tests that may not represent a real scenario. In other words, maybe the end user, using his computer as usual, is not losing as much performance as the synthetic tests show, but the results that Linux 6 got over Zen 4 defy logic, at least initially.

If these results hold over time, AMD has many options to score a good goal on the team against Intel. The red giant seems to have managed to make the Specter V2 mitigation work for it instead of against it. However, others speculate about a possible kernel bug. Surely in the near future we will find out whether it is an illusion or reality.