The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

Please keep in mind that I've only had this processor since yesterday and thus many more Ryzen Linux articles will be published in the coming days, including looking at the Ryzen 7 1700 processor too once my pre-order is processed. I will also be looking at some special Ryzen Linux gaming benchmarks, compiler comparisons, Linux distribution cross comparison tests, and more. Feel free to share any Ryzen Linux tests requests you may be interested in via our forums. Thanks to AMD for pulling through in providing this Ryzen 7 1800X review sample and MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM motherboard.

Due to the limited time to prepare for this morning's launch article, this piece will mostly focus on the Linux experience compared to all the usual Ryzen data being repeated across the many (Windows-focused) publications. As a reminder, the Ryzen 7 processors have eight physical cores but sixteen threads via SMT, each of the cores has a 512 KB L2 cache and there is a 16MB shared L3 cache. The Ryzen 7 1800X as the highest-end model features a 3.6GHz base frequency with 4.0GHz turbo frequency while having a 95 Watt TDP.

The Ryzen 7 1800X is shipping today and retailing for $499 USD while the Ryzen 7 1700X (3.4GHz base, 3.8GHz turbo) will sell for $399 USD and the Ryzen 7 1700 (3.0GHz, 3.7GHz boost) for $329 USD. Not until next quarter are the Ryzen 5 CPUs expected while the Ryzen 3 low-end processors are coming in the second half of this year. The Ryzen processors and supported motherboards are available from the links of Amazon and NewEgg; yes, those are affiliate links, so if making your purchases via them will go to support our Linux hardware testing operations.

The motherboard for testing today was the MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM. In the days ahead will also be Linux tests with the ASUS Prime X370-Pro as I had pre-ordered that motherboard with the AMD Ryzen 7 1700. The X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM is a very fashionable motherboard and among its features are two turbo M.2 ports, USB 3.1 Gen2, heavy-plated titanium heatsinks, and various other features promoted primarily for Windows gamers.