Ubuntu 24.04 Helping Achieve Greater Performance On Intel Xeon Scalable Emerald Rapids

While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.

Now into the feature freeze for Ubuntu 24.04, we can begin getting a close approximate for the performance of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Ubuntu 24.04 has landed a Linux 6.8 kernel snapshot as the version they will use by default for this next Ubuntu release. In addition to the very fresh Linux 6.8 kernel, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will use GCC 13.2 like Ubuntu 23.10 given that GCC 14.1 stable isn't even out yet... GCC 13.2 is a nice upgrade though over the stock GCC 11 compiler shipped by the two year old Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also has a variety of other toolchain upgrades, Python 3.12 by default compared to Python 3.10 with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or Python 3.11 in Ubuntu 23.10, and there's also been various improvements pursued by Canonical to better optimize Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for performance.

In today's article the same dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ Emerald Rapids server is being used for benchmarking across Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS, 23.10, and 24.04 as of the Noble daily state on 7 March. Similar AMD EPYC benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be coming on Phoronix soon along with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS mobile/desktop benchmarks too as we close in on the 25 April release date.

Let's take a look at what Ubuntu 24.04 means for the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable performance especially compared to the common Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support release.