A Look At How The AMD EPYC Linux Performance Has Evolved Over The Past Year

The M-Queens OpenMP performance was leaning in favor of the Linux software components from this year.

The OpenSSL performance meanwhile hasn't budged.

The Blender 3D modeling software renderer's performance also went unchanged.

The PyBench Python performance has improved nicely over the past year.

Lastly, PostgreSQL saw some nice wins with the latest software stack too. The EPYC 7601 was about 13% faster with the latest software components.

In some workloads the AMD EPYC Linux performance was the same or in a few cases slightly lower, but in many benchmarks it was nice to see a few percent better performance when making use of the latest Linux software components that incorporate continued Zen znver1 compiler optimizations, ongoing kernel improvements, etc. In several cases -- including some real-world workloads -- the latest software stack tacked onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS had yielded around a 10% performance improvement over Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS.

It's important to keep in mind though that it will take some time before these latest "2018" Linux packages work their way into the various enterprise Linux distributions that are generally used by workstations/servers. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS contains a bulk of the improvements while with Ubuntu 18.04.2 in several months to come will offer a hardware enablement kernel option for the ~4.18 kernel that will ship in Ubuntu 18.10. But Ubuntu 18.04 LTS won't receive any official GCC 8 compiler support, though there is the gcc-snapshot package that can be installed. Likewise, on the RHEL/CentOS side will be the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 release.