From Phoronix

Since publishing our Linux review of the AMD Phenom 9500 on the Spider platform a month ago, we have continued in our investigation of this first AMD desktop quad-core processor that has been very problematic with Ubuntu 7.10 Linux. Fortunately though this support isn’t stagnate and a better picture is painted when using the latest development builds of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. Per reader requests, we have carried out additional benchmarks of the Phenom 9500 to compare its 32-bit and 64-bit Linux performance.

I’ve just read that Phoronix (the Linux hardware and games site) are going to release their benchmarking tool they use for their hardware tests.

It’s going on four years that we have been providing benchmarks under Linux at Phoronix, and through this time the process has evolved as more applications have come about that gauge Linux system performance and meet our criteria for use in hardware reviews. While our internal process is continually refined, we have received requests for creating a Linux benchmarking manifest so that interested parties are able to easily reproduce our tests for comparative purposes and know everything that’s involved. With that said, we are now working to establish the Phoronix Test Suite that will consist both of detailed documentation defining our hardware benchmarking protocols and free software that automates much of this work.

Benchmarks exist for other systems and there are even a few for Linux lurking around, but this “suite” is definitely looking at the best offering there’s going to be on Linux.

I’m a bit of a hardware nut, so I’m really looking forward to playing around and running a full benchmark on my system.