Intel's Clear Linux Helping AMD EPYC Genoa Hit New Performance Heights

The distribution-supplied Zstd was showing much greater compression performance with Clear Linux over Ubuntu.

Clear Linux on Genoa was also showing great results for the SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 encoder, which is also led by Intel software engineers.

As with the Ryzen 7000 series and prior EPYC processors, using Intel's Clear Linux was helping achieve much greater performance out of Genoa compared to Ubuntu in its out-of-the-box performance. Except for cutting back on the tests run due to the 320 thread limit of Clear Linux that is currently imposed.

The 320 thread limit is what limited the Embree and OIDN performance on Genoa with Clear Linux.

Clear Linux yielded massive speed-ups when running the oneDNN neural network library, which is also developed at Intel and part of their oneAPI collection. The same build process was used on each of the distributions, as usual.