Intel's Clear Linux In 2021 Still Squeezing More Performance For Xeon Scalable

In general the Linux performance has improved over the past two years at large thanks to ongoing kernel enhancements, the GCC compiler continuing to be better optimized, etc.

In some cases though we saw Ubuntu regressing in its latest state while Intel's Clear Linux managed to come out ahead of where it was back at the Cascade Lake launch in 2019.

In a few tests Clear Linux did also regress, but it tended to be in workloads where it was already performing much better than Ubuntu and other distributions that are less aggressively optimized.

In other cases, still healthy competition between these Linux distributions.

There has been much talk of Clear Linux in recent months and their release cadence is much slower than in prior years where it could often see a few new releases per day, but still its performance is looking very good even in comparison to the near-final ubuntu 21.04. Even in proprietary packages like V-RAY and IndigoBench those binaries were faster on Clear Linux than Ubuntu.

Out of these benchmarks and more looking at the Cascade Lake Linux performance between 2019 and 2021, Ubuntu's performance going from Ubuntu 19.04 to 20.04 on this 2 x Xeon Platinum 8280 configuration came out slower by about 2%. Intel's Clear Linux meanwhile was roughly the same for this high-level view. Of these particular tests run, Clear Linux in its latest state is about 9% faster than Ubuntu 21.04. But let's expand the comparison now and look at more workloads between the latest Clear Linux and Ubuntu.