A Look At How The Linux Performance Has Evolved Since The AMD EPYC Launch

Overall, there were many interesting performance changes to find out of the open-source Linux software over the span of the first-generation EPYC processors since their mid-2017 debut. Those wanting to dig into more result data can do so via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

If looking at the geometric mean across the dozens of benchmarks carried out on this AMD EPYC 7601 + Tyan server (all the data in the above result file link), the Ubuntu 19.04 out-of-the-box performance is an 11% improvement compared to the Ubuntu 17.04 speed as what was the latest-and-greatest Ubuntu release when EPYC CPUs were first introduced. These performance improvements are a culmination of both AMD/Zen-specific improvements throughout the stack as well as general improvements we've been covering each kernel cycle as well as further enhancements to the GCC toolchain and elsewhere in the stack. An 11% improvement over the past two years is nice especially considering that Intel systems in affected workloads generally see around an 18% performance hit overall from the combined Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/Zombieload mitigations to date. I will though do a similar Xeon Scalable comparison shortly to see if the Linux optimizations made over the past two years can offset at least partially some of those mitigation hits.