Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2. As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Similar to our August tests, we used a newer Apple Mac Mini for our Snow Leopard vs. Karmic Koala benchmarks. This Mac Mini is made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 clocked at 2.00GHz, NVIDIA MCP79 motherboard Chipset, 1GB of DDR3-1067MHz system memory, a 120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 512MB graphics processor. For some important version numbers when it comes to the software side, Mac OS X 10.6.2 is using the 10.2.0 kernel, X Server 1.4.2-apple45, OpenGL 2.1 NVIDIA-1.6.6, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system. Ubuntu 9.10 final has to offer the Linux 2.6.31-14-generic kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, OpenGL 3.2.0 NVIDIA 190.42, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system. The same package set is shared between the x86 and x86_64 editions, albeit a different CPU architecture. Like our other operating system comparisons, we are strictly looking at the "out of the box" performance for both Ubuntu and Mac OS X.

Version 2.2 "Bardu" of the Phoronix Test Suite was used for carrying out all of these tests under Linux and Mac OS X. Soon we hope to have results from FreeBSD 8.0, OpenSolaris 2010.02, and others added in. The tests we did for today's comparison included Nexuiz, Urban Terror, OpenArena, LAME MP3 encoding, dcraw, GraphicsMagick, 7-Zip compression, Gzip compression, OpenSSL, John The Ripper, timed MAFFT alignment, PostgreSQL, Crafty, Tachyon, and C-Ray.

Let's see now how Mac OS X 10.6.2 compares against both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 9.10.