Linux 6.9 Drives AMD 4th Gen EPYC Performance Even Higher For Some Workloads

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 29 March 2024 at 10:18 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 3 Comments.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Overwrite. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Random Read. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Update Random. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Read While Writing. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

RocksDB benchmark with settings of Test: Read Random Write Random. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

In addition to OpenVINO, another real-world workload showcasing better AMD EPYC performance on Linux 6.9 was the RocksDB database software.

Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Random Read. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Read Random Write Random. Linux 6.8 was the fastest.

Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Update Random. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

Similarly, Speedb was also showing some nice improvements running the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.

Llamafile benchmark with settings of Test: llava-v1.5-7b-q4, Acceleration: CPU. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

Llamafile benchmark with settings of Test: mistral-7b-instruct-v0.2.Q8_0, Acceleration: CPU. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

The biggest gains seen from Linux 6.9 were to much surprise with Llamafile when using the Llava 7B Q4 model. Though the Mistral model also benefited from the kernel upgrade to a lesser extent.

Geometric Mean Of All Test Results benchmark with settings of Result Composite, AMD EPYC Genoa-X Linux 6.9 Kernel Benchmarks. Linux 6.9 27 Mar was the fastest.

Across 64 benchmarks there was around 3% better performance overall on Linux 6.9 Git with the AMD EPYC 9684X... Not too big overall but for a number of the pure user-space workloads the performance was unchanged. If dropping the results where there was not any benefits from Linux 6.9 to just leaving the affected workloads, Linux 6.9 was around 8~9% faster than Linux 6.8 stable on average. This is a win in any event given we weren't necessarily expecting any measurable performance changes out of Linux 6.9 for AMD EPYC 4th Gen. Similar tests on Intel Xeon Scalable and older AMD EPYC servers are being carried out to see if the performance improvements are coming from generic optimizations or more nuanced changes. In any event with the already great AMD EPYC Genoa-X Linux performance, these additional kernel performance gains are just icing on the cake. AMD Ryzen and Intel Core benchmarks with Linux 6.9 are also on my TODO list given the many Linux 6.9 features.

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