Yocto 5.1.2 build speeds - Xeon W-2145 vs. Ryzen 9950X

This is a follow-up on my article on the generational CPU improvements in Yocto builds. I have another machine - that is much more in the same caliber as the new Ryzen system. A Lenovo P520 with a single Intel Xeon running at base 3.7 GHz base clock - at it's time it was however a high-end developer workstation. You can actually still buy those machines on second hand markets and they go for over 1000 EUR (now at January, 2025). How do they compare?

P520 Machine specs

The machine was installed freshly Ubuntu 24.04 with a new Samsung 990 PRO 2 TB NVMe -drive, so it is having the same OS and storage as the Ryzen based machine. The machine is only PCI-E 3.0 compliant, so the drives PCI-E 4.0 capability is not used fully.

It has 32 GB of DDR4-2666 MHz RAM, which is half of what the Ryzen machine has. However, with the core/thread count we're not reaching an out-of-memory situation. The Xeon W-2145 CPU has 8 cores and with hyper threading it can run 16 threads at a time. So, it has 50% less threads running than the Ryzen 9950x.

Build details

We are building the exactly same build as previously.

Build Configuration:
BB_VERSION           = "2.9.1"
BUILD_SYS            = "x86_64-linux"
NATIVELSBSTRING      = "ubuntu-24.04"
TARGET_SYS           = "x86_64-poky-linux"
MACHINE              = "qemux86-64"
DISTRO               = "poky"
DISTRO_VERSION       = "5.1.2"
TUNE_FEATURES        = "m64 core2"
TARGET_FPU           = ""
        

1st build to download everything (this time is not measured) and then 3 consecutive builds, where the tmp and sstate-cache folders are erased.

Please note that with Ubuntu 24.04 there is now an apparmor related issue, which stops the builds by default - you need to apply the workarounds to get the build going.

Results

One would imagine that with 50% less threads we would use double the time, but turns out the other factors (RAM, clock frequency, IPC improvements, drive speed) do impact the results.

For what the Ryzen spent on average 19 minutes, the Intel Xeon W-2145 used 1 hour 2 minutes and 55 seconds - Ryzen thus being 43 minutes 55 seconds faster! That is a very significant difference. The Ryzen is essentially 70% faster than the W-2145.

As earlier, do not take this article as AMD vs. Intel bashing - we are comparing CPUs from completely different generations. The Xeons were released Q3 2017, while the Ryzen is from 2024 - we're talking CPU improvements worth 7 years here.

But, in case you are wondering if it makes sense to upgrade every once in a while - here is some data to prove it.

Now, I wonder how the different virtualizations impact these results? How about WSL for example...