We have a new THE FASTEST FOR THE TASK processor for running a PHP/Wordpress/Magento... website.
If you consider for a moment that in 2020 35%+ of all the webpages in the world run on Wordpress and that Wordpress runs on PHP, it makes a lot of sense keeping an eye on this.
PHP is a single-threaded process and runs much better on CPUs with higher frequencies. AMD Ryzen 5800X is not a typical server CPU, but as it is semi-workstation-oriented and has one of the best single thread performances based on many benchmarks, it might be a hidden gem for PHP. For quite some time Intel i9 series was the leader in this workload if you'd consider it for this task. We wanted to test if this has changed with Ryzen 5800x.
We have a clear interest in PHP performance as we use it for our SaaS (invoicing + webshop platform Klik MALL) and for a really fast Wordpress hosting at WPX.si. For that reason we like to test different CPUs for their PHP performance before putting them in production use. We've also put up a map representing which CPUs are good and which are relatively bad for PHP workload.
Below is a representation of how we conducted a PHP performance test with PHP Bench test by Phoronix on Ryzen 5800X (Proxmox 6.3 installation, Linux Debian 10). We got a score of 851.205 (screenshot) which was at that moment higher than any listed CPU (list is made of average scores by a specific CPU so some results could be higher than ours).
Benchmark on Ryzen 5800X
Test result
./phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/phpbench Phoronix Test Suite v10.2.0 Installed: pts/phpbench-1.1.6 System Information PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core @ 3.80GHz Core Count: 8 Thread Count: 16 Extensions: SSE 4.2 + AVX2 + AVX + RDRAND + FSGSBASE Cache Size: 32 MB Microcode: 0xa201009 Core Family: Zen 3 Scaling Driver: acpi-cpufreq performance (Boost: Enabled) MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte B550 AORUS MASTER BIOS Version: F11 Chipset: AMD Starship/Matisse Audio: AMD Cedar HDMI Audio Network: 2 x Intel 82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ + Realtek Device 8125 + Intel Device 2723 MEMORY: 2 x 16384 MB DDR4-3200MT/s CMK64GX4M4B3200C16 DISK: Samsung SSD 960 EVO 500GB + 240GB SAMSUNG MZ7KM240 File-System: ext4 Mount Options: errors=remount-ro relatime rw Disk Scheduler: NONE Disk Details: Block Size: 4096 OPERATING SYSTEM: Debian GNU/Linux 10 Kernel: 5.4.78-2-pve (x86_64) Security: itlb_multihit: Not affected + l1tf: Not affected + mds: Not affected + meltdown: Not affected + spec_store_bypass: Mitigation of SSB disabled via prctl and seccomp + spectre_v1: Mitigation of usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization + spectre_v2: Mitigation of Full AMD retpoline IBPB: conditional IBRS_FW STIBP: always-on RSB filling + srbds: Not affected + tsx_async_abort: Not affected AMD Ryzen 5800X, Gigabyte B550 AORUS MASTER (F11 BIOS, xmp, pbo) on Proxmox 6.3, Debian 10 PHPBench 0.8.1: pts/phpbench-1.1.6 Test 1 of 1 Estimated Trial Run Count: 3 Estimated Time To Completion: 2 Minutes [17:54 CET] Started Run 1 @ 17:53:44 Started Run 2 @ 17:54:12 Started Run 3 @ 17:54:39 PHP Benchmark Suite: 851360 855004 847252 Average: 851205 Score Deviation: 0.46%
So in 2020/Q4 for the first time AMD climbed over the fastest Intel CPUs on top of our our map representing which CPUs are good and which are relatively bad for PHP workload.