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

Out of 186 tests carried out on these three latest Ubuntu releases, Ubuntu 21.04 came out in front more than half the time. In many of the cases where Ubuntu 21.04 didn't lead, it was often for workloads running neck-and-neck with the prior Ubuntu releases.

If taking the geometric mean of all 186 benchmark results carried out for this comparison on the Ice Lake Xeon server, it was about 2% faster overall.

When looking at the distinct test profiles run on the three Ubuntu releases, among the cases where Ubuntu 21.04 had the greatest advantage were WRF, Wasmer/Rust compilation, KeyDB, PostgreSQl, Open Image Denoise, LLVM compilation, PJSIP, and others.

Those wanting to go through all 186 tests in full for this Ubuntu comparison on the Xeon Platinum 8380 server can see them on OpenBenchmarking.org. This outcome is similar to what we have seen with AMD EPYC 7003 series enjoying nice gains on Ubuntu 21.04. Granted, especially in server production environments there is much more to consider than just the out-of-the-box performance when deciding on a given Linux distribution release. These numbers are largely for satisfying our curiosity and providing perspective for those wondering what the uplift might be if going for the newest Ubuntu release rather than sticking to a particular LTS release. For those curious how the Ice Lake server Ubuntu performance compares to other Linux distributions, those tests are currently being conducted and wrapping up shortly.