6-Way Enterprise Focused Linux Distribution Comparison With An Intel Core i9, Dual Xeon Gold Systems

The single-threaded LAME MP3 encoding benchmark was a race between Clear Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Those three Linux distributions with GCC 7 were also the fastest for FLAC audio encoding.

The Stockfish advanced chess engine was a race between Clear Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

While the asmFish chess benchmark doesn't see much of a change between the Linux distributions since it's all tuned by hand in Assembly.

To little surprise for anyone following x86_64 Linux performance, Intel's Clear Linux distribution by far won the most number of benchmarks on both the Tyan + Xeon Gold server as well as the Core i9 7980XE workstation. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed trailed but with a surprising number of wins. If you are interested in even more performance data, there are also these results across eight Linux distributions on the two systems. Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance, but via OpenBenchmarking.org is all of the data in full.