AMD Renoir Seeing Nice Uplift Moving From Ubuntu 20.04 To 22.04 LTS

With my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS benchmarking thus far it's been focused on shiny and exciting high-end hardware, the latest flagship desktop processors, and interesting old hardware comparisons. But what about Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on recent but mature hardware platforms? For this round of testing I am looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on AMD Ryzen and Intel Core industrial PCs from OnLogic. Especially in the case of AMD Ryzen "Renoir" there is still more performance being squeezed out of this new Ubuntu long-term support release.

Being curious about whether Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS upgrades are worthwhile for more modest hardware than the hardware I am normally testing, I ran an Ubuntu LTS performance comparison using two OnLogic industrial PCs: the OnLogic Helix 500 as a fanless Intel Core i7 Comet Lake system and then the OnLogic ML100G-41 as an AMD Ryzen powered SFF industrial PC using the popular Ryzen 7 4800U. Thanks to OnLogic having provided these review samples and they continue to serve as interesting test targets.

The OnLogic Helix 500 is equipped with the Intel Core i7 10700T Comet Lake processor with integrated graphics, 32GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD. The OnLogic ML100G-41 is built around the Ryzen 7 4800U Renoir platform with integrated Vega graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. They are two distinctly different systems and both being tested in this article not for comparing the CPU vs. CPU performance but rather coverage on both recent but mature support under Linux Intel and AMD hardware platforms for additional perspective on any Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance gains or losses.

Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS is the baseline, which uses the Ubuntu 21.10 hardware enablement stack. Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS has the Linux 5.13 kernel and Mesa 21.2.6, among other updated components, that already makes it much better off than earlier Ubuntu 20.04 LTS point releases.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS in its initial state is using the Linux 5.15 kernel, Mesa 22.0.1, GCC 11.2, and other upgrades over Ubuntu 20.04/21.10 and older releases. Each Ubuntu Linux OS was cleanly installed on the given target and tested in its out-of-the-box / default state for seeing how the performance shifts for the Intel Comet Lake and AMD Renoir platforms. A wide range of benchmarks were carried out on these mini industrial PCs under an assortment of different workload areas.