AMD EPYC Milan Performance Across 11 Different 2021 Linux Distributions

When dealing with AV1 content via the Intel/AOM SVT-AV1 encoder as well as AVIFENC for AV1 image encoding, Intel's Clear Linux distribution was delivering the best performance. The other Linux distributions largely fell into two categories of performance with CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, openSUSE Leap, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian 10.10 all pulling out ahead of Debian Bullseye, Fedora Server 34, Arch Linux, Ubuntu 20.04.2, and Ubuntu 21.04.

Or opening it up to all video encoding tests, including the VP9 and HEVC/H.265 encode tests, Clear Linux continued leading.

For creator workloads consisting of OSPray, Blender, LuxCore, SVT-VP9, SVT-HEVC, SVT-AV1, VP9 vpxenc, AVIFENC, Embree, Open Image Denoise, and OpenVKL, Intel's Clear Linux distribution again was delivering the fastest results on this AMD EPYC 7543 1P server. Ubuntu 21.04 and Debian Bullseye were again at the slowest end.

For high performance computing benchmarks including NAS Parallel Benchmarks, NAMD, HPCG, GROMACS. Mini FE, Incompact3D Xcompact3D, Kripke, MNN, TNN, Tensorflow-Lite, Microsoft ONNX, and PlaidML, openSUSE Tumbleweed picked up a narrow first place finish followed by Clear Linux and Arch Linux. Ubuntu 21.04 was again the slowest, coming in behind even Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS on this particular server.