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

For those wondering about the out-of-the-box Linux performance for popular choices like CentOS Stream or Ubuntu on Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and AMD Genoa, hopefully these results were of use to you. In the case of Ubuntu it certainly pays off switching to the performance governor -- especially on the Intel side with a more pronounced difference of Intel P-State powersave compared to the AMD schedutil numbers. As well these benchmark results were very interesting for looking at the Intel Clear Linux performance on Sapphire Rapids (and Genoa) for when the OS has been extensively tuned for AVX-512 and able to make use of such optimized libraries out-of-the-box when running on capable x86_64 processors. In total I ran 112 benchmarks for this comparison and you can see all of the individual benchmark results in full here.

When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks that ran successfully in all configurations, here's how things break down. Intel's Clear Linux was easily the fastest Linux OS tested for both 4th Gen Xeon Scalable and 4th Gen EPYC. With the dual Xeon Platinum 8490H processors, Clear Linux was 16% faster than CentOS Stream 9 as the second place finisher. With the dual AMD EPYC 9654 server, Clear Linux was 18.5% faster than CentOS Stream 9. On both servers CentOS Stream 9 came out slightly faster than Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS when running in the performance governor mode. When running Ubuntu out-of-the-box with its default governors, switching to the performance governor for Sapphire Rapids led to a 37% increase in performance where on the AMD side changing from the Ubuntu schedutil default to performance made just an 8% improvement.

Lastly is a look at the CPU power consumption across the entire span of benchmarks conducted. While Intel's Clear Linux had a very pronounced lead over the other distributions, overall its power consumption on both the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable servers wasn't that different. The overall power consumption was similar to that of Ubuntu (with performance governor) and CentOS Stream 9 while delivering much better performance.