Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC - Big Speed-Ups Over RHEL7

Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 at the start of May we've been running various benchmarks of this latest enterprise Linux platform. Our tests to date have been with Intel Xeon hardware where it's been performing well and a nice speed-up over RHEL 7 with modern Xeon Scalable CPUs. Similarly, AMD EPYC is also much faster with RHEL 8.0 thanks to the much newer Linux kernel, compiler, and other software updates.

AMD EPYC screams on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 compared to RHEL 7.6. The modern AMD server platform performs much better thanks to the GCC 8.2 compiler replacing the older GCC 4.8 compiler that came well before any Zen support. The Linux 4.18 kernel is also a blessing for newer AMD (and Intel/IBM/ARM) hardware compared to the heavily-patched Linux 3.10 kernel of RHEL7. RHEL 8.0 also shifted over to the MQ-Deadline scheduler for SATA SSDs compared to the non-MQ deadline scheduler and the plethora of upgraded packages compared to RHEL7 also means a big deal for performance at large.

For those wondering about the performance of AMD EPYC on RHEL 8.0, I recently ran some benchmarks on the Dell PowerEdge R7425 server with dual EPYC 7601 processors, 512GB of DDR4 ECC Registered memory, and was using a 500GB Samsung SSD 860 SATA 3.0 SSD during testing.

In this round of benchmarking, Clear Linux, RHEL 7.6, RHEL 8.0, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and Ubuntu 19.04 were used for comparison points while RHEL 7.6 vs. RHEL 8.0 was the main focus. Coming up soon from this same platform will also be openSUSE Leap 15.1 benchmarks. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of benchmarks were carried out in looking at the RHEL8 performance for EPYC.