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.
