Intel Ironlake In 2011 Had Some Gains, Some Losses

Back in December I posted historical Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks looking at the graphics performance over the course of 2011 that this latest-generation of Intel hardware has been supported under Linux. In this article are some similar Intel OpenGL benchmarks of each quarter going back to the end of 2010, but this time it is for the previous-generation Intel Ironlake hardware.

Testing was quite similar to last month's 2011 Sandy Bridge graphics benchmarks, except testing was done from an Intel Core i3 330M "Arrandale" net-top. Ubuntu 11.10 was the base distribution while the 2010Q4, 2011Q1, 2011Q3 (there was no Intel 2011Q2 package), 2011Q4, and Git from 2011-12-09 was tested. The key components of each release included:

2010Q4
Linux 2.6.37 Kernel
xf86-video-intel 2.14.0
Mesa 7.10

2011Q1
Linux 2.6.38 Kernel
xf86-video-intel 2.15.0
Mesa 7.10.2

2011Q3
Linux 3.0 Kernel
xf86-video-intel 2.16.0
Mesa 7.11

2011Q4
Linux 3.1 Kernel
xf86-video-intel 2.17.0
Mesa 7.11.2

2011-12-09 Git
Linux 3.2 Kernel Git
xf86-video-intel post-2.17 Git
Mesa 7.12-devel Git

The rest of the software stack and hardware was maintained throughout the test process. A variety of OpenGL tests were run from this Intel Ironlake system using the Phoronix Test Suite.