Benchmarks Of OpenMandriva's AMD Zen Optimized Linux Distribution Against Ubuntu, openSUSE, Clear Linux

Released this week was OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 as the latest major release for this Linux distribution of Mandriva/Mandrake heritage and continues on the interesting trend of innovations. In addition to continuing to use the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC, among other changes that position it more uniquely than many other Linux distributions out there, their 4.0 release has a "znver1" spin that is optimized for AMD Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors. Here are benchmarks comparing not only OpenMandriva 4.0's x86-64 and Znver1 options but also how that performance compares to the likes of Ubuntu 19.04, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Intel's Clear Linux.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is the first distribution in recent times that is catering towards AMD platform optimizations. The primary difference is all of OpenMandriva's packages have been re-built when enabling the "znver1" compiler optimizations to cater towards the AMD Zen microarchitecture along with other tweaks they hope lead to better AMD performance. But this approach isn't nearly as much as what's employed by Clear Linux as part of Intel's open-source group where they relentlessly optimize all levels of the stack in trying to seek maximum performance out of modern x86-64 hardware, primarily their own microarchitectures. Obviously OpenMandriva doesn't have as many resources as Clear Linux but still an interesting foray for this Linux distribution with AMD currently not backing their own Linux distribution.

For those that don't remember nearly a decade ago, for a while AMD was backing the since-discontinued MeeGo Linux platform during their early APU efforts. But at this stage the closest Linux distribution AMD collaborates with would likely be SUSE/openSUSE given their long history together collaborating on many projects from the original Linux x86-64 kernel porting to the RadeonHD efforts to OpenCL/HSA work on LibreOffice and more to GCC compiler efforts.

So for today's comparison first up is a look at the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 performance of its generic x86 64-bit image compared to a clean install of their new Znver1 optimized image. Following that is showing how the OpenMandriva performance compares to openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 19.04, and Clear Linux.

All of this testing was done from the same system with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, MSI MEG X399 CREATION motherboard, 32GB of RAM, Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics, and Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD. All of these Linux benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite) with each Linux distribution out-of-the-box.