Earlier this month, CentOS Stream 9 was launched as a cutting-edge product developed by Red hat Enterprise Linux 9. Compared with CentOS Stream 8/RHEL8, it provides some good performance upgrades, especially on modern hardware platforms, such as Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and AMD EPYC 7003 Milan server processors.
The following are the benchmark results of CentOS Stream8, CentOS Stream9, Intel’s Clear Linux, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 on AMD and Intel servers:
CentOS Stream 9 is the new continuous delivery version before Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, which means that CentOS Stream 9 will include the latest innovations of RHEL9, and for RHEL users, it can provide new hardware support and early performance optimization. observe.
In order to understand the situation of CentOS Stream 9 and RHEL9, I did some benchmark tests with the latest generation processors on AMD and Intel reference servers. AMD server uses EPYC 7763 2P processor, Intel server uses its flagship product Xeon Platinum 8380 2P processor. Both servers use 512GB DDR4-3200 memory and Intel’s 7.6TB D7-P5510 NVme solid-state drive.
On these two latest generation servers, after performing a clean installation and running out of the box, we tested and compared the following releases:
- CentOS Stream 8 is used to view the current CentOS 8 / RHEL8 status.
- CentOS Stream 9 is a new version as the cutting-edge version of RHEL9.
- Clear Linux is a rolling release version specifically optimized for Intel’s performance.
- Fedora Server 35 is the latest Fedora upstream version.
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 is the current long-term support version.
- Ubuntu 21.10 is the latest non-long-term support version, and its performance currently seems to be ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
We conducted a set of dozens of benchmark tests, focusing on the performance of CentOS Stream 9 compared to CentOS Stream 8 on these latest generation AMD/Intel servers, and how CentOS Stream 9 compared to other Linux distributions.
Compared with CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8, the kernel of CentOS Stream 9 is upgraded from Linux 4.18 to Linux 5.14. GNOME Shell 40 on the desktop replaces GNOME 3.32. GCC 11.2 is used as the default system compiler instead of the old GCC 8.5. Python is pre-installed. 3.9 instead of Python 3.6, and many other package upgrades.
CentOS Stream 9 provides a substantial improvement over the aging status of RHEL8/CentOS Stream 8. AMD EPYC 7763 2P server has a 12% increase from CentOS Stream 8 to 9, while Xeon Platinum 8380 2P Ice Lake server has an overall increase of 10%.
This helps push CentOS Stream ahead of Ubuntu and even Fedora Server. However, the results of Intel Clear Linux still show that there is still more room for optimization on AMD and Intel… On AMD EPYC Milan and Intel Xeon Ice Lake servers, Clear Linux is still faster than CentOS Stream 9 overall 4%.