AMD EPYC Milan Performance Across 11 Different 2021 Linux Distributions

When taking the geometric mean of all 56 benchmarks conducted successfully across the 11 Linux distributions, Intel's Clear Linux was the front-runner on this AMD EPYC 7543. That is of little surprise given all our cross-distribution benchmarking over the years. Following close behind Clear Linux was openSUSE Tumbleweed and then openSUSE Leap 15.3. In last place was Ubuntu 21.04. From Ubuntu 21.04 to Clear Linux out-of-the-box represented a 9% improvement in performance overall out of the same hardware.

Or if simply counting the number of first place finishes, Clear Linux took the top spot 32% of the time followed by openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian being tied for 12.5% each.

Intel's Clear Linux coming in first place is hardly a surprise given its focus on performance and aggressive optimizations. While Rocky Linux and CentOS Stream default to CPUFreq "performance" by default for its CPU frequency governor, Clear Linux takes things much further with more aggressive compiler defaults, various patches and other per-package tuning, and more in the name of delivering leading performance. Unfortunately though Intel has been far more quiet in recent times about Clear Linux, much less communication to their community about new optimizations/features/improvements, and hearing various rumblings for months about changes abound. We'll see what happens though moving ahead given the ongoing restructuring going on at the company and what position Clear Linux will hold moving forward. In any case, as it stands right now Clear Linux is still generally outperforming other 2021 Linux distributions across Intel Core and Xeon Scalable hardware through to AMD Ryzen desktops and EPYC servers as well.

Also having a very strong showing through our tests was openSUSE with not only its rolling-release Tumbleweed but also openSUSE Leap 15.3 generally performing well too. We've seen in this on other AMD platforms in the past with good SUSE/openSUSE performance, which doesn't come as much of a surprise given the long history between AMD and SUSE with contracting SUSE on various efforts from compiler work to kernel improvements and even RadeonHD back in the day and other initiatives between the two companies.

Those wishing to see all the individual benchmarks in full for this cross-distribution comparison on the Tyan 1U server with AMD EPYC 7543 can see the raw data on OpenBenchmarking.org.