AMD EPYC Sees Some Performance Improvements With Linux 4.19

I am still finishing up work on my Linux 4.19 kernel stable benchmarks given it's been (and continues to be) a very busy month for Linux hardware testing, but of interest so far has been seeing a few EPYC performance improvements in some of the real-world workloads.

While a featured article looking at the Linux 4.19 kernel performance is on the way from a diverse selection of hardware, below are some benchmarks from the new Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server we began testing a few weeks ago. It was exciting to see that there are some performance improvements with the freshly minted Linux 4.19 stable kernel on top of the already very competitive (and in some instances jaw-dropping) performance.

Tests were done between Linux 4.17, 4.18, and 4.19 stable using the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

The Parboil OpenMP performance was running slightly faster on the 4.19 kernel.

The Blender 3D modeling performance also sees a small improvement with this newest kernel.

In some cases memcached was also doing better, but on this newer kernel there was higher variance in those figures.

Aside from select multi-threaded workloads seeing small gains with Linux 4.19, most workloads though the Linux 4.19 performance was unchanged for this 64-core / 128-thread AMD Linux server. More benchmarks forthcoming while for now you can see our Linux 4.19 feature overview to learn more about the changes in this kernel that was released as stable on Sunday..