The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what’s possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware… Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.
i must admit, as someone who has been using Linux (on Intel platforms for that matter) for over a decade i didn’t know this existed. that said, this seems like a huge misstep. maybe it wasn’t a widespread product, but having a reference implementation seems like a no brainer. maybe i’m missing something.
Clear Linux was actually a testbed for intel’s compiler optimizations and stateless design concepts - it used function multi-versioning to auto-select the best code paths for your specific CPU at runtime, which is why it benchmarked so well on both Intel and AMD hardwre.
It wasn’t just a regular distro. It had some package related shenanigans or something. And I doubt it was ever updated beyond GNOME 41.