CentOS Stream & Clear Linux Achieve Greater Performance On 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids, EPYC Genoa

In some of the workloads tested, Intel's Clear Linux was delivering staggering performance advantages over the other tested Linux distributions. Clear Linux carries a number of AVX-512 optimized libraries that are used by default on capable hardware among other tuning already carried out by Intel engineers for Sapphire Rapids.

The great Clear Linux leads with oneDNN did equate to increased CPU power consumption.

The Clear Linux numbers though show the potential for not only Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable but also AMD 4th Gen EPYC when really maximizing the OS tuning and optimizations around AVX-512 and looking to exploit the full potential of modern x86_64 processors.

In other benchmarks like Cpuminer-opt with some crypto algorithms the Clear Linux performance on Sapphire Rapids also shot out ahead of Ubuntu and CentOS Stream.

Clear Linux also had a solid showing when it came to the miniBUDE HPC benchmark.

In the case of miniBUDE the Clear Linux gains were while enjoying roughly the same power consumption as with the other Linux distributions, so it was a win for power efficiency too.