One of the more interesting announcements over the holiday period thus far is that moving into 2026, CachyOS is looking to develop a server edition for their Arch Linux based operating system. CachyOS has garnered quite a following among Linux enthusiasts and gamers for its competitive out-of-the-box performance, employing some of the optimizations by Intel’s now defunct Clear Linux distribution, and pulling in all of the goodness from upstream Arch Linux. It will be very interesting to see how CachyOS Server Edition takes shape and whether it will develop a foothold in any prominent enterprise environments. While CachyOS Server Edition isn’t yet released and still in its early stages, over the holidays I decided to see how CachyOS in its current form currently looks for AMD EPYC servers.
In being curious about the prospects of CachyOS on servers, on Christmas I began running some benchmarks of the current CachyOS release on an AMD EPYC Supermicro server and comparing those performance benchmark results to upstream Arch Linux on the same hardware as well as Ubuntu Linux for reference. Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS as the current release prominently used on servers was used plus Ubuntu 25.10 was tested as well for showing the more recent Ubuntu Linux improvements and in leading up to the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.
The same server was used for all of the CachyOS / Arch Linux / Ubuntu benchmarking in using a 96-core AMD EPYC 9655P Zen 5 processor, Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard, 12 x 64GB DDR5-6000 memory, and 3.2TB Micron 7450 NVMe SSD.
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 25.10, Arch Linux, and CachyOS were all freshly installed on this AMD EPYC Supermicro server this week and evaluating their respective out-of-the-box performance with all of the default kernel configuration, CPU frequency scaling drivers/governors, etc for seeing the out-of-the-box impact of CachyOS on servers.
Of course, between now and whenever CachyOS Server Edition ends up being released in 2026 there will likely be more server hardening and additional optimizations in tow. Once CachyOS Server Edition is officially released, I’ll happily take it for a spin on some AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon servers for seeing how the performance looks at that time. Especially in the absence of Intel’s Clear Linux that was shutdown this year, I’ve been eager to see some new Linux OS software performance optimizations in the server distro space.
Beyond looking just at the raw performance across dozens of different workloads, the CPU power consumption of the AMD EPYC 9655P was also monitored for evaluating the performance-per-Watt too as an ever important metric in the server space.
