AMD EPYC Performance Over The Past Six Years Of Ubuntu Linux LTS Releases

As part of my many different benchmarks being carried out due to the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release, I was curious to do a broader Linux server performance look over the past several long-term support releases of Ubuntu Linux. For making this happen I used an AMD EPYC 7601 2P as the original EPYC "Naples" server platform that can go as far back as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for software compatibility and then seeing how it has evolved with the 18.04, 20.04, and now 22.04 operating system updates.

Mostly for curiosity purposes, I ran fresh benchmarks of Ubuntu 16.04.7 / 18.04.6 / 20.04.4 / 22.04 on the same AMD EPYC 7601 2P server. Additionally, a run of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS when moving to Linux 5.18 Git was additionally conducted for the most bleeding-edge look at how the performance is on this first generation of EPYC processors. This testing may be of interest if weighing whether to move older AMD server platforms to the newly-released Ubuntu 22.04, etc. Similar tests with Intel Xeon are forthcoming.

All of this testing was carried out on a Dell PowerEdge R7425 server previously provided to Phoronix by AMD for benchmarking. The Dell PowerEdge R7425 was equipped with two AMD EPYC 7601 (32 core / 64 threads per socket) processors, 16 x 32GB DDR4-2666 memory, and the OS install/testing being done on an Intel Optane 900p 280GB NVMe solid-state drive. This Dell PowerEdge server has continued holding up well over the years and continues working with the latest Linux releases.

The Ubuntu Server builds of 16.04.7 / 18.04.6 / 20.04.4 / 22.04 were all cleanly installed on this AMD EPYC server and running in their out-of-the-box / default configuration for seeing how the Ubuntu Linux performance has evolved on this Zen system over the course of these compatible Ubuntu LTS releases.