Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. Clear Linux On The Intel Core i9 9900KS, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

While we have been seeing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS offer better performance with newer hardware platforms, how does the performance compare to Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux? Here are some benchmarks on both AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS systems.

On two current generation x86_64 desktop platforms here are benchmarks of the current Ubuntu 20.04 near-final development state up against Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X was with the ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi and the Intel Core i9 9900KS on the ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard. Both systems had 16GB of RAM, and Samsung 970 EVO NVMe solid-state storage.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is officially shipping in April and by default uses the Linux 5.4 kernel, GCC 9.2 compiler, GNOME 3.36, Mesa 20.0, Python 3.8.2, PHP 7.4, and a wealth of other updated packages.

Intel's Clear Linux 32610 in its current rolling-release form is on Linux 5.5, GNOME 3.34.3, GCC 9.3.1, Mesa 20.1-devel., Python 3.8.1, and other generally latest packages. Of course, on top of the latest upstream are all of Intel's performance optimizations from defaulting to Mq-Deadline to numerous compiler optimizations to employing PGO+LTO to various patching.

For today's article is simply a fresh look at the Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Clear Linux performance on the Core i9 9900KS and Ryzen 9 3900X to see how Canonical's operating system is going up against Intel's aggressive performance tuning. With the Phoronix Test Suite there were more than 80 benchmarks run on the two systems and two Linux distributions.