Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS Performance Preview With Intel Xeon Scalable

For the most part the I/O performance hasn't changed much particularly if using one of the newer HWE stacks in the Ubuntu 18.04 point releases, but one notable exception is IO_uring. The new IO_uring interface has much promise for improving Linux I/O efficiency and still being adopted by more software projects. IO_uring was only introduced in Linux 5.1 and thus if you haven't used a HWE stack, moving to Ubuntu 20.04 is the first time you'll see it out-of-the-box on an Ubuntu LTS release.

In select cases we are finding Ubuntu 20.04 to offer up some network efficiency improvements over the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS series.

For those building software from source, Ubuntu 20.04 can offer some meaningful improvements for heavy computational workloads particularly with newer Intel/AMD/Arm CPUs. GCC 7 to GCC 9 alone is a big upgrade plus the newer Glibc, newer Open MPI, and countless other big version bumps over the past two years.