Intel Continues To Demonstrate The Importance Of Software Optimizations: Clear Linux + Xeon Max Benchmarks

Clear Linux was the fastest choice out-of-the-box on this Intel Xeon Max server for running the ClickHouse database.

Surprisingly for the Open Image Denoise benchmark Clear Linux and CentOS were the slowest choices.

With the Zstd binaries supplied by each OS, Clear Linux tended to deliver the best performance.

While going from Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS to Ubuntu 23.10 yielded some nice improvements for the Xeon Max 9480 performance on this Supermicro server, moving to Clear Linux yielded 34% better performance out-of-the-box out of 43 benchmarks carried out. Part of the strong gains are from defaulting to the "performance" governor by default rather than "schedutil" as is commonly used by most Linux distributions. But even with CentOS Stream 9 on this server where it too uses the performance governor, Clear Linux was still 13% faster than that RHEL upstream.

Long story short, Linux software performance continues evolving and largely moving in the right direction, but as it concerns the out-of-the-box performance there is still much more that can be done to cater to modern workstations and servers especially. Intel's Clear Linux platform continues doing a good job at showing what is possible for Linux x86_64 performance for experiments or those administrators wishing to stick to ISV defaults, etc. As we move into 2024, hopefully we'll see more from other Linux distribution vendors over modernizing their operating system defaults and better embracing modern compiler toolchain features and kernel features for making the most of modern hardware.