Clear Linux Offers Up Advantages For Ice Lake Xeon, CentOS Comes In Strong

It didn't take long at all to see Intel's own Clear Linux trending in first place when running on the brand new Xeon Platinum 8380 processors. Even with the release rhyhthm down from years ago and seemingly less interest by Intel in their Linux distribuition, it still carries quite a punch for out-of-the-box performance.

It is important to note that CentOS and Clear Linux default to P-State performance governor while most Linux distributions -- even the other server distributions -- still use the P-State powersave mode by default and that is for some cases why CentOS / Clear Linux are performing in front of the others.

In some cases P-State on the Ice Lake Xeon seems to perform very poorly with that common governor default.

While in other cases Clear Linux's leading performance is attributed to a mix of compiler optimization flags by default and other compiler optimizations, patching key components with additional optimizations, and other work they've been engaged in over the years.