Early Benchmarks Of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS

After this weekend sharing benchmarks of the recent Ubuntu 12.04 LTS point releases, here's some complementary tests that offer a look at the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" performance against the current state of the "Trusty Tahr", a.k.a. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

From the same HP Elitebook with Intel Core i5 2520M "Sandy Bridge" processor bearing HD Graphics 3000, 4GB RAM, and Intel 160GB SSD, a development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from last week was tested in the same configuration and manner as the 12.04.2/12.04.3/12.04.4 tests.

Over the recent Ubuntu 12.04.4 release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has the Linux 3.13 kernel (over the 3.11 kernel hardware enablement of 12.04.4), Unity 7.1.2 (over Unity 5.20 as found in 12.04.x), Mesa 10.0 in place of Mesa 9.2.1, and is using GCC 4.8.2 rather than GCC 4.6 as found in all Ubuntu 12.04 LTS releases. The new kernel, Mesa, and X.Org components of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will eventually work their way into Ubuntu 12.04.5 while the GCC compiler and other software components are not back-ported to the older Long-Term Support releases.

Plenty more Ubuntu 14.04 LTS benchmarks from a variety of hardware and looking at a variety of loads will come once the Trusty Tahr release is closer in April, but if you have any test requests of Ubuntu Linux feel free to let us know via the forums or @MichaelLarabel on Twitter. All of our testing is handled in a fully automated, independent reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite with OpenBenchmarking.org.