AMD officially announced the Ryzen 7000 series, AM5 desktop processors at the end of August, and while Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake-S is more cost-effective, the red team’s Zen 4 also has some qualities that enthusiasts are more concerned about. On Friday, Phoronix shared some benchmark results for the Ryzen 9-7950X flagship CPU and found that AMD has done a pretty good job of tackling various vulnerability mitigations, as well as more granular switch options.
(From: Phoronix)
It is clear that with CPU vulnerability mitigation enabled by default – the Zen 4 chip still maintains a pretty good overall advantage compared to disabling mitigation.
Phoronix wrote.
"On Zen 4 platforms, you can still use mitigations=off to disable SSB and Spectre (V1/V2) mitigations while the kernel is booting, leaving the system in a vulnerable state. Although many of the CPU security vulnerability mitigations we've seen before, have taken some performance hits. But on the Zen 4 Ryzen R9-7950X, you don't actually have to disable it."
Across the 190 tests conducted in this evaluation, the default state of enabling CPU vulnerability mitigations won an average of nearly 72%.
Zen 4 CPU Vulnerability Mitigations – GeoMean Test Comparison
Neowin points out that while Zen 4 is largely an improvement on Zen 3, its test scores using the retpoline patch on the previous-generation R9-5950X platform are still slightly behind Intel CPUs.
