Phoronix tested four Thinkpad laptops in Fedora Linux, featuring Zen 2 , Zen 3 , Zen 3+ , and Zen 4 AMD Ryzen mobile CPUs to observe the generational performance difference in a non-Windows environment. Overall, Phoronix found that AMD's Zen 4 architecture yielded the greatest performance gap of the four CPU architectures, easily outpacing the performance advantages from Zen 2 to Zen 3 and from Zen 3 to Zen 3+. However, some of those Zen 4's gains come from AVX-512 support.
The Linux-focused review outlet used four generations of Lenovo Thinkpad laptops for testing. The Zen 2 equipped model featured a Ryzen 7 4700U 8-core processor with 8 cores, 8 threads, 8MB of L3 cache, and a turbo clock of up to 4.1GHz. The Zen 3-equipped Thinkpad featured a Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U CPU with 8 cores, 16 threads, 16MB of L3 cache, and a turbo frequency of up to 4.4GHz. The Zen 3+ equipped ThinkPad ran a Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U with 8 cores, 16 threads, 16MB of L3 cache, and a 4.7GHz clock. Finally, the Zen 4-powered Thinkpad utilized a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U, featuring 8 cores, 16 threads, 16MB of L3 cache, and a 5.1GHz maximum turbo clock.
Phoronix put all four laptops through numerous CPU and GPU tests, including browser-focused benchmarks , code compilation, Blender, 7-Zip, AVX-512, encoding, gaming, and more. Overall, as previously mentioned, Phoronix found that the 7840U yielded the greatest generational performance leap over the Zen 3-based CPU architectures, being 30% quicker than the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U Zen 3+ chip. AMD's Zen 3-based chips could not make nearly as big of a generational improvement, with the 6850U "only" having a 15% performance improvement over the older 5850U, and the 5850U only having an 11% improvement over the 4700U.
One reason why the Zen 4 chip shows such massive dominance over its predecessors is due to the extra hardware support these new chips have, including AV1 encode and AVX-512 support. In tests utilizing these newer processing techniques, the 7840U was usually twice as fast as its Zen 3 or Zen 3+ counterpart since AMD's older chips don't have hardware acceleration for AV1 encode or AVX-512. In raw computing tasks, like browser-based benchmarks, the 7840U was generally closer to its Zen 3+ counterpart, but still outperformed it.
The behavior of the other three chips was consistent throughout most of the benchmarks Phoronix ran. Overall, the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U and Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U ran virtual identical performance numbers most of the time while the Ryzen 7 4700U was usually around 10% slower than the 5850U in most tests. However, there were some outliers where the Ryzen 7 4700U was over twice as slow as the 5850U, like in the PyPerformance 1.0.0 test.
Gaming was also another area where the newer chips excelled. The Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U unsurprisingly dominated all the gaming tests by a long shot, being nearly 2x as fast as the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U. Without a doubt, this is due to the architectural difference between the two models, with the 7840U sporting a much newer RDNA 3 Radeon 780M integrated graphics unit, compared to the RDNA 2-based Radeon 680M found in the 6850U.
Phoronix's review provides helpful insight into the architectural performance improvements of AMD's modern Zen architectures on Linux-based operating systems. Linux applications don't always behave the same as on Windows platforms for various reasons, including different OS schedulers and drivers .
The biggest takeaway from Phoronix's data is that AMD's architectural improvements are not slowing down and, if anything, are speeding up. We saw this in the AVX-512 and AV1 tests, where the 7840U was performing well beyond what its advertised raw compute performance is capable of. This is the direction CPU development is heading, where hardware-accelerated application-specific improvements simultaneously accompany raw performance improvements.
