Mac OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Performance

Moving away from the Sandy Bridge graphics performance, the multi-threaded ray-tracing performance with C-Ray was the same between Mac OS X 10.7.3 and the 10.8 snapshot while at about the same speed as Ubuntu 11.10/12.04.

Ubuntu Linux was much faster than Mac OS X 10.8 when it came to OpenSSL performance. However, this may be due to discrepancies in how Mac OS X is handling the Core i5 2415M CPU. The i5-2415M is a dual-core CPU with Hyper Threading while Mac OS X (10.7 and 10.8) only reports two threads where as Linux has no problems seeing all four threads on this mid-2011 Apple Mac Mini.

Ubuntu was also slightly faster than Mac OS X for MAFFT and 7-Zip compression. The 7-Zip results also did better with the forthcoming 12.04 release than under 11.10.