Intel's Linux Software Optimizations Still Pay Off For Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" E-Core CPUs
When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks conducted on each of the tested Linux distributions, Intel's Clear Linux was around 27% faster than Ubuntu 24.04 out-of-the-box and Arch Linux. Switching to the Intel P-State "performance" governor from the default did help increase the performance as expected, but even then Clear Linux was still faster by 14%.
When looking at the dual socket CPU power consumption across the span of all the benchmarks, Clear Linux was consuming just about 3.5% more (10 Watts) on average than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the performance governor or 16% more compared to Ubuntu 24.04 with its defaults, which still bodes well for the power efficiency of Clear Linux with its strong performance. (Note the peak power consumption with the Clear Linux numbers seems to be a race condition / anomaly.)
👁 Intel Xeon 6 running Clear Linux
So for those wondering how well Clear Linux performs on Intel Xeon 6700E Sierra Forest, it still performs pretty amazing for an excellent out-of-the-box performance experience. While Clear Linux does enjoy many AVX-512 optimizations and the like, these results show that Clear Linux can still deliver meaningful advantages even for E-core-only Xeon 6 Sierra Forest servers.
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