Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" Linux Performance ~14% Faster Since Launch
Right from the start some performance improvements were noted when using the January 2026 state of Ubuntu 26.04 relative to Ubuntu 24.04 from mid-2024. With these application workloads, it's likely attributed to the new GCC 15 compiler at play compared to GCC 13 originally and/or the much newer kernel in springing forward from Linux 6.8 to Linux 6.18. By the time Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is officially out in April, the Linux 7.0 kernel is expected to be the default.
With the Blender benchmark relying on the same upstream binaries on each platform, it rules out the compiler providing the faster render times here. Thus the much newer Linux kernel may be attributed to these gains. Over the past year and a half have been a number of upstream kernel optimizations especially for today's high core count CPUs from Intel and AMD.
For those considering the dense Sierra Forest processors for a CI/CD build farm or similar, the build times improved very nicely with the modern software stack compared to the mid-2024 state at launch.