An Early Look At The Linux 4.16 Kernel Performance With AMD EPYC

The GIMP image manipulation program saw some measurable performance slowdowns on Intel with the Spectre/Meltdown mitigation, but on the AMD side there isn't much of a difference.

The Redis performance also doesn't appear affected for EPYC.

The Stress-NG synthetic kernel benchmark does indicate slower performance in general with the Linux 4.16-based kernel than 4.14/4.15.

The socket activity performance is actually higher since Linux 4.15.

The Apache web server performance was affected by Linux 4.15+ with its Spectre mitigation but disabling Retpolines does boost the performance albeit not to the 4.14.0 performance level.

If you want to compare the performance to the recent Intel kernel tests, you can find those numbers in that article. More Linux 4.16 kernel benchmarks in general from a variety of systems are forthcoming on Phoronix.