AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora & Ubuntu On AMD 4th Gen EPYC Genoa

Over the holidays some fun benchmarking was to be had with the dual AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" processors providing a combined 192 cores / 384 threads and seeing how various modern Linux distributions were competing for this flagship 4th Gen EPYC server configuration. Up on the testing block was AlmaLinux 9.1, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 37930, Debian 12 Testing, Fedora Server 37, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04 daily.

This round of testing was to see that all major modern Linux distributions were running fine with the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series, which they were and no surprises came about, and to look at the out-of-the-box performance... Just some benchmarks for reference for those wondering about the out-of-the-box capabilities and also to remind about the importance/impact of software optimizations.

The same AMD Titanite server with two EPYC 9654 processors at stock speeds were used for all of the testing with 1.5TB of RAM and a 800GB Intel P5800X NVMe SSD. In the automated system table, reported CPU clock speed differences just amount to sysfs reporting differences between the kernels on the tested distributions... The EPYC 9654 processors were at their stock speeds for all testing.

This testing followed last month's look at Intel's Clear Linux on Genoa. Since then the Clear Linux kernel has also resolved its prior 320 CPU thread limitation and when re-testing that rolling release indeed it was now able to make use of all 384 CPU threads as with the other Linux distributions.

This is quite a straight-forward, out-of-the-box look at how these various Linux distributions are running on the AMD 4th Gen EPYC hardware without any extra tuning on the different Linux operating systems.