Intel Xeon Platinum 8380: 2021 vs. 2022 Performance For Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS Stream

Even in workloads not impacted much by the CPU frequency governor in use, Clear Linux continued to lead on the Xeon Platinum 8380 thanks to its many performance patches and other tuning/optimization work by Intel engineers.

With the open-source software progress over the past year, the Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance largely continues moving in the right direction.

One of the biggest improvements on the Clear Linux side besides its OpenJDK Java optimizations shown earlier is a substantial improvement made to its PHP performance. Clear Linux already aggressively optimized their PHP package in the past while over the past year have now nearly doubled its speed.

Overall there continues to be quite healthy competition among these Linux distributions.

When taking the geometric mean of the dozens of benchmarks carried out, going from Ubuntu 20.04 LTs to 22.04 LTS on the Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake server meant only a 4% improvement overall. With CentOS Stream going from versions 8 to 9 showed many nice improvements thanks to the newer toolchain and other updated software. However, CentOS Stream 9 now defaulted to the powersave governor rather than performance, which hurt its out-of-the-box performance in many benchmarks. Intel's Clear Linux meanwhile going from its state in May 2021 to its current state now showed around a 6% improvement overall.

At the Ice Lake launch last year Intel's extensively-tuned Clear Linux was 44% faster than Ubuntu 20.04 LTS out-of-the-box while now with the current Clear Linux against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is up to a 48% advantage. Those wanting to go through all the benchmarks individually can do so via this result page.