Ubuntu 18.04 LTS vs. Fedora 28 vs. Clear Linux Benchmarks

Given last week's release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and then Fedora 28 having debuted earlier this week, I decided to see how these popular tier-one Linux distributions now compare to Intel's own Clear Linux platform. This three-way Linux distribution comparison was carried out on six systems comprising both of Intel and AMD CPUs.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Fedora 28, and Clear Linux 22250 were each tested on six systems. The hardware for each system was obviously maintained the same throughout the testing process. The purpose of testing the six systems isn't to compare the performance between processors/systems given other hardware differences at play, but for getting a relatively broad look at how each of the three modern Linux x86_64 distributions are performing in an out-of-the-box manner across these different generations and brands of hardware. The six test systems included:

Core i7 6800K - The older Broadwell-era system with the Intel Core i7 6800K (6 core / 12 thread) processor with MSI X99A WORKSTATION motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card.

Core i7 8700K - The current-generation Coffeelake Core i7 8700K test system with ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and using the onboard UHD Graphics 630.

Core i9 7980XE - The high-end Core i9 7980XE with 18 cores / 36 threads with ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070.

2 x Xeon Gold 6138 - The Xeon Scalable server platform via a Tyan 1U S7106 platform with 96GB of RAM.

EPYC 7601 - The AMD EPYC server platform with the highest-performing 7601 SKU in a single-socket configuration using a Tyan 2U TYAN B8026T70AE24HR and having 128GB of RAM.

Ryzen 7 2700X - The Ryzen 7 2700X with ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VII HERO motherboard, 8GB RAM, and Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card.

On all six systems a 525GB Crucial MX300 SATA 3.0 solid-state drive was used as the basis for each OS. The out-of-the-box configuration for each tested operating system included:

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - The Bionic Beaver shipped with the Linux 4.15 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.28.1, Mesa 18.0-rc5, GCC 7.3.0, and EXT4 file-system while defaulting to the CFQ I/O scheduler.

Fedora 28 - Fedora 28 out-of-the-box makes use of the Linux 4.16 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.28.1 on Wayland, Mesa 18.0.1, GCC 8.0.1, and EXT4 with the CFQ I/O scheduler.

Clear Linux 22250 - Intel's rolling-release Linux distribution currently uses the Linux 4.16.6 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.28.1, Mesa 18.1-devel, GCC 7.3.0, and EXT4 with the MQ-DEADLINE I/O scheduler.

Each of these three Linux distributions on the six test systems had their benchmarks carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.