Intel's Clear Linux Outpacing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 36 & Other H1'2022 Distros

Out of 101 tests carried out in full where they successfully ran on all of the Linux distributions tested from this Xeon Scalable Ice Lake Server, Intel's Clear Linux platform had the most first place finishes with wins 46% of the time while in second was CentOS Stream 9 with first place finishes 14% of the time and then AlmaLinux 8.5 in third at 11%.

When it came to last place finishes, Arch Linux in its out-of-the-box server configuration via Archinstall was in last most often at 20% of the time followed by openSUSE Tumbleweed in last 19% of the time and then Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS at 14%.

When taking the geometric mean of all the results successfully ran on all nine tested Linux operating systems, Clear Linux was in first. Also delivering healthy finishes were CentOS Stream 9 and AlmaLinux 8.5. CentOS/RHEL/AlmaLinux make use of P-State performance by default like Clear Linux that helps in better performance for many of the server benchmarks out-of-the-box, but that alone wasn't enough to see CentOS Stream / AlmaLinux match what is provided by Clear Linux. Thanks to Intel's continued performance open-source optimizations, Clear Linux still came out to being about 7% faster than those RHEL-based distributions or around 42% faster than the other Linux distributions tested in their out-of-the-box configurations.

See all the raw benchmark results in full from this H1'2022 Linux distribution comparison via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.