Intel's Clear Linux Helping AMD EPYC Genoa Hit New Performance Heights

Long story short the performance of Intel's Clear Linux was looking very good with AMD 4th Gen EPYC thanks to Clear's existing AVX-512 optimizations and many other performance tuning in the form of patches, more aggressive compiler flags by default, the performance governor by default on desktops/servers, and many other optimizations they have built up over the years. But with Clear Linux currently imposing a 320 thread CPU limit, that limited running some of the workloads/benchmarks that can still scale past that amount for this 384-thread configuration of the EPYC 9654 2P server.

In any event this was some interesting holiday benchmarking and goes to show the significant difference that default/out-of-the-box software optimizations can still make for a high performance platform like AMD EPYC Genoa and hopefully in 2023 we'll see more Linux distributions beginning to make use of x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels and a variety of other optimizations/improvements that have been employed by Intel's Clear Linux for years. There slowly is more of a focus by Linux distributions to begin thinking about "modern" defaults such as with the recent steps by several vendors on an x86-64-v2 feature baseline. In January I'll be back with a much larger Linux distribution comparison from this AMD 4th Gen EPYC server platform, with this article effectively being a teaser for what's to come.