Intel's Clear Linux In 2021 Still Squeezing More Performance For Xeon Scalable

Now onto the side-by-side looking at just the latest Ubuntu and Clear Linux state with a more expansive set of benchmarks. The same Xeon Platinum 8280 server was used for testing though with switching over to an Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD for storage

As one can quickly see, even in 2021 on the mature Cascade Lake platform Intel's Clear Linux is still holding significant advantages for many workloads compared to a more "normal" Linux distribution like Ubuntu. Even with Clear Linux seeing less releases these days and less communication over new optimizations, their work is still paying off well from small to huge gains depending upon the test thanks to its mix of more modern defaults, aggressive compiler optimizations, kernel patches, making use of modern compiler features, and other tuning.

Out of 94 tests run between Ubuntu 21.04 and Clear Linux 34420, the Intel distribution was delivering the best result 88% of the time.

If taking the geometric mean of all 94 tests, Clear Linux on the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 server was 19% faster than the near-final state of Ubuntu 21.04. See all the benchmark results in full over on OpenBenchmarking.org.

That's where things stand today with Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable Linux performance while it will be interesting to see how well 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable performs on Clear Linux and other modern Linux distributions when the time comes. It will also be interesting to see how Clear Linux and Intel's other open-source software efforts fit into Pat Gelsinger's Intel vision.