Farewell Benchmarks Of Intel's Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Shows More Performance Left To Tap
Even for scripting languages and more there was really excellent out-of-the-box performance on this AMD EPYC 9965 2P server running Intel's now-discontinued Clear Linux. But again that's been the case for years with Intel's in-house Linux distribution performing remarkably well on AMD x86_64 too. From talking with various Intel engineers over the years, their policy with Clear Linux in relation to AMD was to not explicitly do anything to help or hurt the performance on non-Intel platforms.
When taking the geometric mean from dozens of benchmarks completed on all configurations tested for this 5th Gen AMD EPYC performance, Clear Linux had a very nice final showing. Clear Linux was 34% faster than Ubuntu 25.04 out-of-the-box or 30% compared to AlmaLinux 10. With the performance governors, Clear Linux was still 29% faster than Ubuntu and 19% faster than AlmaLinux 10. The delta is lower than on last week's Intel tests topping out at 48% since as mentioned for this dual AMD EPYC 9965 configurations, the Clear Linux kernel configuration topped out at 512 threads rather than 768 threads on AlmaLinux and Ubuntu. But even with that handicap, Clear Linux was still leading in performance overall.
Running Clear Linux on this AMD EPYC 9965 2P server did lead to higher CPU power use for the combined two sockets. But even with the 20% higher power average than Ubuntu 25.04, it was worth it for the 34% faster performance in that configuration to yield better performance-per-Watt.
👁 Clear Linux installing on AMD EPYC Turin server
Farewell Clear Linux, your splendid out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 performance was exceptional whether it be on Intel or AMD processors.
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