Linux 6.6 Looks To Be Very Lucrative For AMD Server Performance

TiDB was one of several database servers that showed significant speed-ups when moving from Linux 6.5 to Linux 6.6 with last week's Bergamo testing. The EPYC 9654 benchmarks show a very captivating improvement too. The EPYC 9684X GenoaX performance was also lifted higher but not nearly as significant as the Genoa and Bergamo results. The Xeon Platinum 8490H performance was flat across the tested kernels.

Across various TiDB database operations the same trend was clear: big wins for EPYC 9654 Genoa and EPYC 9754 Bergamo with the Linux 6.6 upgrade, the EPYC 9684X Genoa-X performance was improved but much less than Genoa/Bergamo (and now in some cases these processors outperforming the 9664X), and the Xeon Platinum 8490H performance was unchanged. With TiDB the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" performance comes out ahead of these 4th Gen EPYC CPUs but now with Linux 6.6 Intel's lead is much smaller than with prior kernels.

PostgreSQL is another popular database solution that showed big gains with Linux 6.6 on Bergamo last week. With the new Genoa numbers there is a great improvement while the EPYC 9684X performance was lifted higher but to a lesser extent than Genoa and Bergamo. The Xeon Platinum 8490H performance was again unchanged by the Linux 6.6 upgrade.

It's also worth noting that PostgreSQL is another workload where Intel Xeon Scalable traditionally performs very well but now with AMD 4th Gen EPYC on Linux 6.6 the gains are so significant that the performance is much closer.