Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" Running Great With Clear Linux, Sizable Wins Over Ubuntu

Following my Core i5 13600K and Core i9 13900K Linux reviews for these new Raptor Lake processors, which were carried out under Ubuntu Linux, I've been carrying out my usual follow-up tests like looking at how well these new Intel CPUs are running under other distributions. To little surprise, Intel's own rolling-release Clear Linux distribution can offer some big-time improvements over a stock Ubuntu installation.

I'm in the middle of working on a broader Linux distribution/OS comparison using the Intel Core i9 13900K, but for today's article are just some numbers when putting Ubuntu 12.10 up against the latest Clear Linux.

Ubuntu 22.10 is on the Linux 5.19 kernel, GCC 12.2, and other recent components while the rolling-release Clear Linux is on the bleeding-edge with already using Linux 6.0, a GCC 12.2.1 snapshot, and also other more recent packages like the recently debuted Python 3.11 that is notable for its upstream performance optimizations as well. Intel's Clear Linux also continues carrying a variety of patches in the name of performance tuning, an optimized kernel configuration, function multi-versioning and other techniques to optimize the performance of different packages, and then modern defaults like sticking to the performance governor and aggressive CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS.

The same hardware was used throughout testing and the Core i9 13900K was running at stock speeds. Both Ubuntu and Clear Linux were cleanly installed on the system and running with its default packages and out-of-the-box settings.