Running Clear Linux On AMD's Ryzen + X370: Still Competitive Performance

I'm working on an AMD Ryzen Linux distribution benchmark comparison and will have those results to publish soon using a Ryzen 7 1800X. One of the interesting distributions I was curious about its Ryzen performance with was Intel's Clear Linux distribution. It turns out it runs and there are scenarios of it having better performance than Ubuntu.

While Clear Linux out of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is obviously catered and tested around Intel hardware, they don't go out of their way to hinder the AMD processor support. Booting the latest Clear Linux release with the Ryzen 7 1800X and MSI X370 motherboard, the installer worked just fine and the subsequent installation was running without any issues -- well, nothing AMD-specific, the main blocker for some will be Clear Linux not supporting NVIDIA or Radeon graphics at this time.

Using the same hardware, I compared the latest Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 daily ISO to that of the latest rolling Clear Linux release.

For those unfamiliar with Clear Linux, our benchmarks repeatedly show it generally outperforming other tier-one Linux distributions due to its aggressive compiler defaults, kernel tuning, optimizations to different packages, making use of function multi-versioning (FMV), and other changes as outlined at ClearLinux.org. But this is our first time trying it on an AMD CPU.





Sure enough, in some tests, Clear Linux is faster than Ubuntu 17.04 running on the AMD Ryzen system.

While in some tests, Ubuntu edged out ahead:




More details on these early results can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. A broader Linux distribution comparison to give more context to the performance will be published later today or tomorrow.