It's been nearly one year since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U Granite Rapids server platform for continuing my testing of the flagship Xeon 6980P processors. Curious how the Xeon 6980P 2P performance has evolved on Linux since then, I ran some benchmarks on the newly-released Ubuntu Server 26.10 against the tests carried out last year on Ubuntu 25.10 with the same hardware.

This article provides a look at how the upstream Linux performance has evolved on the Gigabyte Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids server over the past year going from Ubuntu 25.10 to Ubuntu 26.10. With Ubuntu 26.10 there is the Linux 7.3 kernel incorporating all of the kernel improvements over the past year, GCC 15.3 by default, and various other software updates rolled out in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and now Ubuntu 26.10.

The Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 was paired with 2 x Intel Xeon 6980P processors, 24 x Micron MRDIMM-8800 memory, and the 1.5TB KIOXIA KCD8XPUG1T92 NVMe SSD. Thanks again to Giga Computing / Gigabyte for having supplied the review unit barebones server platform for making the continued Granite Rapids testing possible at Phoronix.