Intel's Linux Software Optimizations Continue Paying Off Big Time For Xeon Emerald Rapids

Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors already offer some nice generational improvements with improved AVX-512, faster DDR5 memory support, and also the new Optimized Power Mode option. But if wanting to maximize the performance capabilities even further, Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues working out well for maximizing the performance capabilities of Intel x86_64 hardware.

Since the Emerald Rapids launch a few months ago I've been curious to see how much more uplift Clear Linux would be able to provide on these latest Intel Xeon server processors. Recently I finally got around to testing it out as part of a broader Linux distribution comparison for seeing the out-of-the-box performance impact. As I've seen and shown across numerous Phoronix articles, there's a great deal of performance that is left otherwise untapped out-of-the-box on the more prominent Linux distributions.

Benchmarked on the 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ "Emerald Rapids" reference server was a fresh round of testing Arch Linux, Fedora Server 39, CentOS Stream 39, Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and then Clear Linux 41150. All of these Linux distributions were freshly installed to the same 3.2TB Micron NVMe SSD and then benchmarked in their out-of-the-box state on this dual socket flagship Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids server.

It's a straight-forward comparison so let's get straight to the data for what the out-of-the-box Linux OS performance is looking like in 2024 on current Intel Xeon hardware.