Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" Linux Performance One Year After Launch
This week marks one year since Intel formally introduced their Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors led by the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380. Given the occasion, here are benchmarks looking at the Linux performance at-launch across CentOS, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu and then again against those latest Linux distributions in their current state now for seeing how the Linux performance has evolved over the past year.
With the never-ending work on the Linux kernel and other open-source components like the GCC compiler, I was curious to see how the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P performance has evolved since launch especially with Intel's ongoing optimization work thanks to their large open-source engineering pool at the company. Shortly after the Ice Lake server launch last year I ran benchmarks on:
- Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.04
- Clear Linux 34630
- CentOS Stream 8
For this fresh 2022 benchmarking on the same Xeon Platinum 8380 2P server I then ran the latest releases with:
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using a daily near-final snapshot from a few days ago.
- Clear Linux 36130 as the newest release of that Clear Linux rolling release distribution.
- CentOS Stream 9 as the newest upstream CentOS Stream state that is what will eventually be Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL9).
The same hardware was used throughout all of this 2021/2022 testing consisting of the Xeon Scalable Ice Lake reference platform, the two Xeon Platinum 8380 processors, 16 x 32GB DDR4-3200 ECC memory, and 800GB INTEL SSDPF21Q800GB Optane SSD DC P5800X NVMe solid-state drive.
Each time the Linux distributions were freshly installed and benchmarked in their stock configuration. Thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite per test profile versioning of each benchmark, the same benchmark versions and configuration were obviously maintained for this comparison of the 2021 launch vs. 2022 current Linux performance for the Xeon Platinum 8380 flagship processors. Dozens of different benchmarks were carried out for evaluating how the Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake performance has evolved since launch.