Intel's Linux Software Optimizations Still Pay Off For Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" E-Core CPUs
Right from the start with running the ClickHouse database server, Clear Linux showed its aggressive out-of-the-box performance. The Ubuntu 24.04 run when switching to the Intel P-State performance governor immediately confirmed the big benefit compared to the default powersave behavior, something we've consistently seen for years with both Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors. But Clear Linux still delivered even better performance than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the performance governor. Also worth noting is this ClickHouse benchmark is using the project's official binaries and thus the Clear Linux compiler optimizations not even coming into play here.
The strong performance of Clear Linux also yielded the best performance-per-Watt for the ClickHouse database.
Clear Linux also showed off its string Intel Xeon 6 performance capabilities with the RocksDB database.
Of course, in some workloads was very little change between the Linux distributions under test on this Intel Xeon 6780E server.