Intel Linux Kernel Optimizations Show Huge Benefit For High Core Count Servers

The results basically speak for themselves for the benefit of Intel's work on better optimizing the Linux kernel for higher CPU core counts.

Facebook/Meta's RocksDB was another software package benefiting from Intel's kernel optimizations to reduce contention and other enhancements primarily for higher core counts.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks carried out across the different thread configurations, here is the geometric mean across the many different workloads tested. As the core/thread counts increased, Intel's Clear Linux lead greatly expanded compared to where Ubuntu 23.04 was running on this Sapphire Rapids server with its default kernel.

For many of the workloads the benefits were quite profound and hopefully the Intel engineers involved will be able to get all of their relevant optimization patches upstreamed into the mainline kernel soon. Intel's work clearly shows the Linux kernel stands to benefit from greater scalability with today's increasing core count systems, especially with AMD Bergamo and Intel Sierra Forest around the corner but already these patches can be very significant even for today's servers.

Coming up next week will be similar tests on AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa for showing how Intel's kernel patches are still very beneficial there too and showing how RHEL9 fits into the equation too.