Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS / 20.10 / 21.04 Performance On Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake

With the WRF weather forecasting benchmark, Ubuntu 21.04/20.10 delivered significantly better performance than Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS on this dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server. The likely explanation here is due to the GCC 10 compiler found on Ubuntu 20.10/21.04 compared to GCC 9 with Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.

Across a variety of other benchmarks Ubuntu 21.04 was also delivering measurable performance benefits over earlier releases. Even in cases like OpenVKL where the same official binary is used across the distributions, Ubuntu 21.04 was yielding better performance, likely due to the newer kernel with this brand new Intel server platform.

Similarly, TensorFlow Lite was showing very nice gains with Ubuntu 21.04 compared to last year's releases on this Ice Lake server.

In some cases though the performance difference is quite small between the distributions.

But depending upon the workloads of most importance to you and whether you need LTS-level support, running Ubuntu 21.04 on the Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake processors can yield sizable uplift.