Ubuntu 12.04 Is A Mixed Power Story
The Nexuiz Sandy Bridge Ubuntu 12.04 results are the same story as OpenArena.
There isn't any noticeable performance improvement for C-Ray out of Ubuntu 12.04 (both 11.10 and 12.04 are using GCC 4.6, but when GCC 4.7 is available in Ubuntu 12.10 there will be a C-Ray Sandy Bridge performance improvement, as noted in the recent compiler articles). However, the power consumption of the Intel Core i5 notebook remains lower while the system is under full-load with this multi-threaded ray-tracing benchmark.
The Apache web-server performance is up greatly (for anyone running a web-server on your notebook...) except the power consumption is not too good. The Ubuntu 12.04 power consumption is lower than 11.10, but it remains much higher than Ubuntu 11.04.