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.

In our AMD Phenom 9500 review, we had detailed all of the problems we had experienced with this newest AMD platform, which mostly came down to a kernel panic when switching from an AMD Athlon 64 X2 to Phenom and stability problems once the system was up and running. With Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4, which utilizes the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, the experience was much more pleasant and when running this quad-core processor we no longer experienced as many stability problems. Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4 had ran on our AMD Spider test system for more than 18 hours and during that time we had only experienced two sporadic reboots. During the benchmarking itself we have no stability problems to report.

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