AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs are faster in Linux with Spectre V2 mitigations enabled

Last week, Michael Larabel from Phoronix revealed that the new AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processors, while still in need to have some software mitigations enabled, were also "surprisingly faster for the most part leaving the relevant mitigations enabled." Back then, the processor tested to draw such conclusions was the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X. This week, he is back to confirm his initial findings by testing the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X.

When running the benchmarks, Larabel confirmed that keeping the mitigations enabled proved faster in most cases for the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X as well. The situations where disabling them proved helpful were mostly various synthetic kernel benchmarks. On the other hand, positive results that went up to an increase in performance of over 25 percent were recorded in two cases, namely the Bork File Encrypter and Stargate Digital Audio Workstation tests.

The most positive side of the story is that the Zen 4-based processors are not affected by most of the known security vulnerabilities. However, enabling or not enabling certain software solutions that were conceived to address vulnerabilities only present in Intel processors still has an impact on AMD's chips.

The results of all mitigation tests mentioned above are available on this page. Those who want to check last week's data for the tests ran on the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X can find it here.

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