Intel Xeon Max Sees Some Performance Gains For OpenVINO & ONNX With Linux 6.9

Last week being surprised to see a number of AMD EPYC performance gains with Linux 6.9 using that in-development kernel, I was curious about what other platforms may be benefiting from better performance on this kernel that will debut as stable in May. This week I turned to running some fresh benchmarks of Intel Xeon Max using the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR. More than 230 benchmarks were carried out of Linux 6.8 stable versus Linux 6.9-rc2 in looking for any performance differences.

There are many new features with Linux 6.9 and I was surprised with the AMD 4th Gen EPYC performance gains noted last week. There weren't any explicit AMD EPYC performance optimizations with Linux 6.9 but there was some work on the kernel scheduler, workqueues, and other common low-level code. So I was also curious about Intel Xeon Scalable gains with the new kernel. In being some weeks since last running any Xeon Max benchmarks, I used the SuperMicro server first in kicking around some benchmarks of Linux 6.8 vs. 6.9-rc2 without any other changes to the system hardware/software state between tests.

Two Intel Xeon Max 9480 processors were running in the HBM caching mode for this round of benchmarking across 236 different benchmarks looking at a wide variety of domains/workloads. Let's see where Linux 6.9 is making a difference for Intel Xeon processors.