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

Those are the most interesting result highlights...

Of 79 tests run on the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server across the six Linux distribution releases, Intel's own Clear Linux was in first place 65% of the time followed by CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Linux 8 each picking up the remainder with Ubuntu and Fedora combined seeing just a handful of wins.

If taking the geometric mean of those 79 tests that ran across all tested Linux distributions, Ubuntu and Fedora were performing close to the same while CentOS and Clear Linux were the front-runners. As noted, both Clear Linux and CentOS default to P-State Performance governor by default and some follow-up tests are looking at the power/performance impact on P-State governors in the context of the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors. In the case of Clear Linux, it was 4% faster on average than CentOS Stream while being about 31% faster than the latest Ubuntu stable release when it comes to looking at the default / out-of-the-box performance.

Those curious about the stock Linux distribution performance on Xeon Scalable Ice Lake can see all the benchmark results in full over on OpenBenchmarking.org.