The Performance Of Arch Linux Powered CachyOS On AMD EPYC Servers

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 29 December 2025 at 10:10 AM EST. Page 7 of 7. 30 Comments.

Of 104 benchmarks in total I ended up running across the four Linux operating systems tested on this AMD EPYC 9655P Supermicro server, CachyOS came in first place 55% of the time.

Coming in last place most often was Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS with half the time being the slowest. This isn't particularly surprising as even with the Linux 6.14 HWE kernel and other select upgrades landing for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, its compiler toolchain and the like remain nearly two years old. At least with Ubuntu 25.10 and looking ahead to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS there are some nice performance improvements on the horizon.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks conducted, CachyOS was the fastest with a 11.6% performance advantage over Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS or 9.1% over the newer Ubuntu 25.10. Over upstream Arch Linux, CachyOS maintained a 5% lead thanks to its out-of-the-box optimizations.

The CachyOS performance advantage was achieved without any significant impact on the CPU power consumption use for this 96-core AMD EPYC 9655P server. The CPU power consumption between the four Linux distributions were on average in the 243~248 Watt range and all peaked at 388~389 Watts with the exception of Arch Linux at 393 Watts, all nicely within the 400 Watt TDP rating of this Zen 5 server processor.

It will be very interesting to see what comes of CachyOS Server Edition in 2026. It may deliver very competitive performance and carry on in the spirit of Intel's Clear Linux but with being a community-driven project and without the commercial/enterprise support of the more pronounced leaders like Ubuntu and RHEL and SUSE, it will be interesting to see if CachyOS can ultimately establish a foothold in areas like HPC servers. Whatever the case, you can expect benchmarks on Phoronix once the formal CachyOS Server Edition ships.

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