Linux Patch Boosts Intel 5th Generation Xeon “Emerald Rapids” Performance by up to 38%, up to 18% Less Power

Intel’s 5th generation Xeon Scalable processors codenamed Emerald Rapids, have been shipping since late 2023 and are installed at numerous servers today. However, Emerald Rapids appears to possess more performance and efficiency tricks than it initially revealed at launch. According to the report from Phoronix, reporting on a Linux kernel patch sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), there is a chance for up to 38% performance increase while using up to 18% less power on all Intel 5th generation Xeon machines. Thanks to Canonical (maker of Ubuntu Linux) engineer Pedro Henrique Kopper, who explained the patch on the LKML, we found out that changing a single line of code yielded this massive increase.

Ubuntu Linux, as well as many other distributions, ship with Energy Performance Preference (EPP) for Emerald Rapids with a “balance_performance” value of 128. However, changing the value to 32 now yields a massive performance improvement alongside using less power. The EPP “balance_performance” is the default out-of-the-box setting for many Linux distributions. Users manually setting the “performance” mode in the EPP are not expecting any increase from this patch, as the “balance_performance” mode had issues balancing power and efficiency. Introducing this new setting yields more performance for machines that run at default settings, and this is especially important for data centers where the need for lower power and increased performance is constantly surging. Especially at hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Meta, which may run tens of thousands of these CPUs at default settings to keep them stable and well-cooled, who can now enjoy a massive performance increase with less power consumed.

Below, you can see the patch quote as well as more performance/power measurements.