A Look At The Intel Cascade Lake Performance For Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks

Continuing on with our benchmarks this month of the new Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors in the form of the Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, here are some preliminary figures showing not only how various Linux distributions are comparing to Microsoft Windows Server 2019 but also FreeBSD 12.

Since the Xeon Scalable 2nd Gen launch at the start of April we've been running many different benchmarks including the performance on different Linux distributions and tests on FreeBSD 12.0. Now for seeing how Windows Server fits into the mix, here are Windows Server 2019 Build 17763 as well as Ubuntu 18.04 running on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) from that same Windows Server build.

The same server was used for all testing that included two Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, GIGABYTE MD61-SC2-00 Storage Server. 12 x 32GB DDR4-2933 memory, and a Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD for storage. Besides Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2019 WSL, this comparison includes CentOS 7, Clear Linux 28660, openSUSE Leap 15.0, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and FreeBSD 12.0 (both with its default LLVM Clang compiler and when opting for GCC 8.3). The stock OS packages are used on each platform unless otherwise noted.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of Linux/BSD/Windows-compatible benchmarks were used.