Fedora Workstation 33 Performing Very Well - Runs Past Clear Linux On Intel Tiger Lake Notebook

Following the recent AMD Zen 3 tests on Intel's Clear Linux a user expressed curiosity over the Intel-backed Linux distribution on Tiger Lake hardware given I hadn't done a multi-distribution comparison there yet. Using the Dell XPS 9310 as my lone Tiger Lake notebook I ran some benchmarks of Clear Linux, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora. For a change, Clear Linux wasn't the distant front-runner.

From the Dell XPS 13 9310 with Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake processor, Clear Linux 34130, Manjaro 20.2, Fedora Workstation 33, and Ubuntu 20.10 were all tested on this same Tiger Lake notebook.

All four Linux distributions were freshly installed and tested in their out-of-the-box state.

While on desktops and servers we are used to seeing Clear Linux smashing the rest in out-of-the-box Linux performance, it wasn't as much the case this time. Clear Linux does still rack up wins but its aggressive performance optimizations ultimately lead it to more frequently hitting the thermal limits and throttling with today's ultra-thin Intel EVO notebooks. So with the Clear Linux runs there is also an increased number of runs and higher variance as reported for a number of tests due to Clear Linux on the Tiger Lake Dell XPS running warmer than the other configurations. On a geometric mean basis of all the results, Fedora Workstation comes out in front of the rest for this modern Intel/Dell notebook.

In any case with the Phoronix Test Suite across dozens of benchmarks are these Tiger Lake results on Clear Linux, Manjaro, Fedora, and Ubuntu.