Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Linux Performance Evolution Since Launch

The Intel oneDNN performance was better for some test cases and slower in another with the Linux OS upgrades.

The Liquid-DSP open-source digital signal processing library saw some regressions on all three 2022 Linux distributions tested.

Clear Linux's Python performance is faster thanks to already having integrated Python 3.11.

Ubuntu and CentOS enjoyed incremental performance improvements thanks to newer major PHP releases. Clear Linux's PHP performance meanwhile saw a dramatic improvement thanks to their aggressive compiler optimizations and tuning. Clear Linux's PHP package does indeed perform around twice as fast as the other distributions in benchmarks thanks to that out-of-the-box tuning.

When taking the geometric mean of the several dozen benchmarks ran in total, here is how the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" Linux performance looks from the early 2021 launch to now at the end of 2022. The Ubuntu 21.04 vs. 22.10 performance was largely unchanged on this 80-core / 160-thread server while Clear Linux and CentOS Stream both enjoyed much more significant uplift. In the case of CentOS Stream there was the big CentOS Stream 9 shift while in the case of Clear Linux is the continued investments by Intel in software optimizations and constantly rolling in new updates. Both Clear Linux and CentOS Stream enjoyed 5~6% better performance overall with the CentOS and Clear Linux OS software upgrades. Intel's performance-tuned Clear Linux meanwhile remains around 7% faster overall than CentOS Stream as we end out 2022.