Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 16.04 On The Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake Workstation

With Clear Linux continuing to outperform other Linux distributions on Intel hardware, I was curious to see how the Intel OTC Linux distribution was performing when trying it with one of the new Xeon CPUs at our disposal for testing.

For some quick Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS development benchmarks I compared some of the original benchmarks for the Xeon E3-1280 v5 to that of a fresh install of Clear Linux 6470 as the latest build of this rolling-release-like distribution at the time of testing.

Thanks again to MSI Computer for making this testing possible by loaning us the assortment of Xeon v5 processors and providing the C236A Workstation motherboard as our latest Xeon board.

A larger Linux distribution comparison on this hardware will come in the near future. For now, onto these initial Ubuntu 16.04 vs. Clear Linux results for the same system and hardware settings:


With the Ubuntu tests being from our original 9-way CPU Skylake Xeon Linux comparison, the Ubuntu results are with the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS set to "-O3 -march=native" rather than just the distribution's defaults. This puts the results closer to Clear Linux, which ships with optimized compiler flags by default.


Clear Linux still did end up edging past Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 in a number of the benchmarks.



See all of the results for this quick Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 16.04 benchmark comparison on the Xeon E3-1280 v5 via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.