With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP’s tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux. In this article is looking at how the Microsoft Windows 11 performance is out-of-the-box with the HP Z6 G5 A workstation as configured by HP versus a clean install of Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu Linux Squeezes ~20% More Performance Than Windows 11 On New AMD Zen 4 Threadripper

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Source: Phoronix – Phoronix Premium Cyber Week Sale For Ad-Free, Single Page Articles & Native Dark Mode

Back in Linux 6.2 the in-kernel Zstd compression/decompression code was updated against the Zstd 1.5 upstream state. Now for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year the plan is for updating to Zstd 1.5.5 that should provide better compression performance…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.8 Looks To Upgrade Its Zstd Code For Better Compression Performance

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft Looking To Add Windows Media Foundation Transforms “MFTs” To Mesa

Intel has announced their 2024 updates to oneAPI that they are promoting as the Intel Software Developer Toolkits 2024 release…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Software Developer Toolkits 2024 Released For Pushing AI, Python & HPC

One of the features that was merged yesterday into the GCC compiler just before shifting to its “bug fixing” phase of development was Intel’s AVX10.1 support…

Source: Phoronix – Initial Intel AVX10.1 Support Makes Its Way Into GCC 14

FreeBSD 14 has been released as stable today as the newest major release of this leading open-source BSD operating system…

Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD 14.0 Released: Supports Up To 1,024 CPU Cores, OpenZFS 2.2 & Adds Fwget

Mesa’s NVK Vulkan driver atop the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite cases. Though don’t get your hopes too high for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as the performance is still overall slow and the driver stack remains a work-in-progress, but at least it’s a step in the right direction…

Source: Phoronix – Open-Source NVIDIA “NVK” Driver Is Now Conformant For Vulkan 1.0

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available…

Source: Phoronix – Firefox 120 Ready With Global Privacy Control, WebAssembly GC On By Default

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X/7980X Linux benchmark review shows just how well the new Zen 4 powered HEDT Threadripper processors can perform with up to the 64 core flagship offering. The results were stunning while today the review embargo also expires on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series for the professional-catered SKUs that offer up to 96 cores and support up to 8 channel DDR5 system memory. Here are the initial benchmarks of the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX for showing the performance potential of this outright workstation performance monster if your budget allows.

Source: Phoronix – AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Linux Performance Benchmarks

Last month AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series along with the new Threadripper PRO 7000 WX Series for bringing Zen 4 to the HEDT and workstation space. Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available via DIY retailers on the 21st, today marks the review/performance embargo expiration for the Threadripper 7000 series. First up today is a look at how the new Threadripper 7970X 32-core and Threadripper 7980X 64-core processors are performing for Linux HEDT workstations… Or the TLDR: the incredible Linux performance and potential for a wide-range of creator and developer workloads now possible with the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series.

Source: Phoronix – AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X & 7970X Linux Performance Benchmarks

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the “general bugfixing mode” and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release…

Source: Phoronix – GCC 14 Shifts From Feature Development To “General Bugfixing” Mode

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante’s NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously…

Source: Phoronix – Etnaviv NPU Open-Source Driver Now Twice As Fast For Image Classification Workloads

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it wasy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features…

Source: Phoronix – Distrobox 1.6 Released For Easily Launching New Distros Within Your Terminal

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7-rc2 Released: “Slightly Larger Than Average”

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release…

Source: Phoronix – Polychromatic 0.8.3 Released For Latest Open-Source Razer Experience On Linux

Narrowly missing the Linux 6.7 merge window that closed last week is the AMD 1-Wire “AXI” driver but it’s now on tap for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year…

Source: Phoronix – AMD AXI 1-Wire Driver Queued Ahead Of The Linux 6.8 Kernel

Luc Verhaegen has announced the return of the Graphics DevRoom for FOSDEM 2024 taking place in early February in Brussels…

Source: Phoronix – Open-Source Graphics DevRoom Returning For FOSDEM 2024

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft Enables OpenGL 4.6 Support Over Direct3D 12

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary…

Source: Phoronix – Inkscape Celebrates 20 Years With New Release