OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Delivers Some Performance Improvements

For some workloads, the recently-released Apple OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" operating system is faster than its predecessor, OS X 10.8 "Lion". Here are some comparative benchmarks from the Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display and Intel Ivy Bridge 2.3GHz Core i7 processor.

Similar to yesterday's benchmarks of the Retina MacBook Pro graphics under OS X, these are just some simple comparative numbers of OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8. No Linux distribution was tossed into this mix since there isn't any Linux distribution working reasonably well on the Retina MacBook Pro -- there's mode-setting/graphics issues still being ironed out, the system can't boot with APIC, and other hardware difficulties to be illustrated in future articles. (See yesterday's article for more details for now along with Apple's Retina MacBook Pro Causes Linux Woes.) Next week will be benchmark results from other Apple hardware that works for an OS X 10.7 vs. OS X 10.8 vs. Linux performance comparison. Even if you don't care about Apple's operating system or their products, it's important to see how the OS competition compares.

The purpose of this OS X 10.8 benchmarking is basically to show any performance changes over OS X 10.7 and to indicate some general performance numbers for the 2.3GHz Retina MacBook Pro. With that said, thanks to this article, if you want to see how your laptop or other computer system performs against the Retina MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8, it's quite simple. With the Phoronix Test Suite installed on the OSX/Linux/Solaris/BSD system, it's a simple matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1208098-SU-OSXMOUNTA86 thanks to the power of OpenBenchmarking.org.

For other Retina MacBook Pro benchmarks to see until waiting for the key results on Phoronix, see the VMware Virtualization With OpenGL Still Smacks Oracle VirtualBox that was done from the same hardware.