Ubuntu 21.04 Enjoys Better Performance But Still No Match To Intel's Clear Linux

As we have been showing in a few articles already, Ubuntu 21.04 is in good shape performance-wise and generally coming ahead of Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 LTS. We've seen that on a number of systems in the lab, but how does this better performance out of Ubuntu 21.04 compare to say Intel's Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks.

Ubuntu 21.04 is in good shape performance speaking with its Linux 5.11 kernel, now using the Schedutil governor by default on supported configurations rather than ondemand/powersave, Ubuntu 21.04 has begun making use of link-time optimizations (LTO) for its package builds, and various other improvements and package upgrades that help with performance. We've been seeing this on both Intel and AMD systems so far.

Curious though how Ubuntu 21.04 is competing then with Intel's Clear Linux that is known for its aggressive performance optimizations, here is a three-way comparison with Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 21.04, and Clear Linux 34530 on the same system. Used this go-around was the Intel Core i9 10980XE workstation with ASRock X299 Steel Legend motherboard, 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

Each Linux distribution was benchmarked on this system in its out-of-the-box and cleanly installed state for seeing how Ubuntu 21.04 improves the system performance and if it's able to compete better with Clear Linux.