Intel's Linux Software Optimizations Continue Paying Off Big Time For Xeon Emerald Rapids
So while not particularly surprising given my extensive Clear Linux benchmarking over the years across numerous Xeon generations as well as testing it on desktop/mobile platforms too, it's fascinating to see the gains still demonstrated by Clear Linux in 2024 atop the latest 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors.
When taking the geometric mean of all the data across all the benchmarks that successfully ran on all of the out-of-the-box Linux distributions tested, Clear Linux was 31% faster than the second fastest Linux distribution: Arch Linux. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the slowest of the tested Linux distributions while at least Ubuntu 23.10 is faster and the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is even faster and in very good shape for Intel Emerald Rapids -- the software state of the two-year-old Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is beginning to show its age.
So while more Linux distributions are evaluating packages built for x86_64-v3 or similar and making other adjustments to their platform in the name of better modern hardware platform, Intel's Clear Linux still easily leads when it comes to the best out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 performance. Hopefully more Linux distributions follow suit for the benefit of maximizing the Linux x86_64 potential. Hopefully we'll see AMD investing more as well into Linux software optimizations as well as other CPU architecture vendors as there is often much still to tap from the software side.
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