Intel Continues To Demonstrate The Importance Of Software Optimizations: Clear Linux + Xeon Max Benchmarks

The largest difference among the tested Linux distributions was found to be with TensorFlow running on the Xeon Max processors. Clear Linux and CentOS Stream 9 were much faster than the others. Why? In this case it comes down to the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling governor defaults... CentOS/RHEL and Clear Linux default to the "performance" governor where as the others use Intel CPUFreq Schedutil by default. The scheduler utilization governor is supposed to make good choices, but often doesn't come close to matching the performance governor... It would be nice if Ubuntu Server and other server/workstation-focused Linux distributions would really default to the performance governor or at least if Schedutil would behave more appropriately for high core count servers.

For video encoding workloads is another area where the CPU frequency scaling governor default can make a huge difference in the out-of-the-box performance. Clear Linux also performs better than CentOS Stream here thanks to the default compiler flags set by Clear Linux in the name of catering to that better out-of-the-box performance.

Clear Linux was leading the race when it came to the video encode performance.

When it came to the OpenSSL benchmarks using the OpenSSL package found by each operating system, Ubuntu 23.10 surprisingly surpassed the others. Clear Linux though was tied with Fedora while Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and CentOS Stream were much slower than the rest due to using OpenSSL 3.0 rather than OpenSSL 3.1 that has more optimizations.