As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.

[1]

With the AMD Titanite reference server running two AMD EPYC 9654 96-core Genoa processors, 24 x 64GB DDR5-4800 memory, and 800GB Intel Optane DC P4800X 800GB (SSDPF21Q800GB) NVMe SSD, I compared the performance of the prior end of 2022 benchmarks of Intel Clear Linux 37860 and Ubuntu 22.10 to that of running the latest Clear Linux 42790 and Ubuntu 24.10 on the same AMD EPYC server.

[2]

The two year software comparison on Clear Linux meant going from Linux 6.1 to Linux 6.12, GCC 12.2.1 to GCC 14.2.1, Python 3.11 to Python 3.13, OpenJDK 18 to 21 for Java, and a variety of other software package updates. Plus all of the Intel performance optimizations that their engineers have been pushing into the distribution over the past two years.

[3]

Going from Ubuntu 22.10 to Ubuntu 24.10 meant going from Linux 5.19 to Linux 6.11, GCC 12.2 to GCC 14.2, Python 3.10 to Python 3.12, and various other software updates. Ubuntu Linux continues to rely on the schedutil governor by default rather than the "performance" governor used on Clear Linux and commonly on other enterprise Linux distributions. Thus there was an additional Ubuntu "perf governor" run both on 22.10 and 24.10 looking at the difference of repeating the tests when switched over to the performance governor for ruling out the CPU frequency scaling governor difference.

So with this end of year benchmarking is a look at how the AMD EPYC Genoa Linux performance has evolved over the past two years as well as where the Intel-optimized Clear Linux is competing with Ubuntu on this AMD EPYC 2P server.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=epyc-genoa-2year-linux&image=genoa_2year_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=epyc-genoa-2year-linux&image=genoa_2year_2_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=epyc-genoa-2year-linux&image=genoa_2year_3_lrg