AMD 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan" Sees Some Performance Benefits To Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 2 May 2024 at 05:00 AM EDT. Add A Comment

With the recently released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I've shown various benchmarks how it can deliver nice performance gains over both Ubuntu 23.10 and the existing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on different platforms. Those benchmarks have tended to focus on the latest-generation processors/platforms given that's where the excitement is these days. But for those on older platforms like AMD 3rd Gen EPYC "Milan" servers, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrade.

For those wondering about the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS vs. 24.04 LTS performance difference for more mature platforms than the other Ubuntu 24.04 benchmarks I've carried out recently, this quick article is for you. Using a dual socket AMD EPYC 7303 server I recently carried out some benchmarks to see what differences there are going from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the latest hardware enablement stack to the brand new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 24.04 Benchmarks - AMD EPYC Zen 3

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS comes the new Linux 6.8 kernel, the GCC 13 compiler as a significant upgrade over GCC 11 on Ubuntu 22.04, and many other package updates introduced over the past two years.

DaCapo Benchmark benchmark with settings of Java Test: Avrora AVR Simulation Framework. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

The OpenJDK Java performance is looking rather nice on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS even for this older EPYC 7003 series server.

Timed Mesa Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the fastest.

Timed Linux Kernel Compilation benchmark with settings of Build: allmodconfig. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the fastest.

Timed PHP Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the fastest.

Timed Node.js Compilation benchmark with settings of Time To Compile. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was the fastest.

Software build times increasing aren't of surprise. Newer GNU Compiler Collection versions tend to build slower as a result of new optimization passes and other additions to increase the performance of the resulting binaries or other features at the expensive of slower build times.

AOM AV1 benchmark with settings of Encoder Mode: Speed 6 Two-Pass, Input: Bosphorus 1080p. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

srsRAN Project benchmark with settings of Test: PDSCH Processor Benchmark, Throughput Thread. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

srsRAN Project benchmark with settings of Test: PDSCH Processor Benchmark, Throughput Total. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

In some general CPU workloads there were wins here and there collected on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for this AMD EPYC 7303 2P server but far less differences than when running the very newest Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers with Ubuntu 24.04.

SPECFEM3D benchmark with settings of Model: Tomographic Model. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

SPECFEM3D benchmark with settings of Model: Water-layered Halfspace. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

SPECFEM3D benchmark with settings of Model: Homogeneous Halfspace. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

Quicksilver benchmark with settings of Input: CORAL2 P2. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

Primesieve benchmark with settings of Length: 1e13. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

HPC workloads were commonly delivering slight performance advantages when running on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with this AMD EPYC server.

Speedb benchmark with settings of Test: Read Random Write Random. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was the fastest.

Occasional I/O workloads were showing some uplift but for the most part was flat.

Overall there were some wins to using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this more mature AMD EPYC 7003 series server but not nearly as much of a difference for the very latest Intel and AMD hardware on Ubuntu 22.04 vs. 24.04 LTS for performance.

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