Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion DP2 Battles Ubuntu 10.10

Upon the release of the first Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" Developer Preview, we had delivered early benchmarks of this Apple operating system slated for release this summer. Since then, there has been the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview 2 (DP2) so we have carried out an updated set of Mac OS X 10.7 performance benchmarks. This also includes a comparative look at the Mac OS X Lion performance against Ubuntu Linux 10.10.

This testing compares the performance of Mac OS X 10.6.6, Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview 1 (Build 11A390), Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview 2 (Build 11A419), and lastly for reference were Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 benchmarks. With Mac OS X 10.7 11A419 it's reporting an 11.0.0 64-bit kernel, X.Org Server 1.9.5, NVIDIA graphics, case-sensitive Journaled HFS+ file-system, and we were using the latest Xcode3 package providing GCC 4.2.1 and LLVM/Clang 1.6.

With Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 we were using a stock package set of the Linux 2.6.35-22-generic kernel, X.Org Server 1.9.0, NVIDIA 260.19.06 binary driver, an EXT4 file-system, and we had manually installed GCC 4.2.1 to be comparable to Apple's Xcode release used on Mac OS X 10.7 builds and Mac OS X 10.6.6.

The test system was an Intel Mac Mini with an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 (2.00GHz) processor, 1GB of system memory, 120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics.

The early Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad the means of test orchestration and results were then stored on OpenBenchmarking.org. Published tests included BlogBench, timed Apache compilation, timed ImageMagick compilation, BYTE, C-Ray, Compile Bench, 7-Zip, FFmpeg, Fhourstones, MAFFT, Nexuiz, OpenArena, PostgreSQL, PostMark, Threaded I/O Tester, Urban Terror, and Warsow.

Overall, Mac OS X 10.7 DP2 (11A419) is a nice upgrade over the first preview. The experience was not perfect and still encountered a few issues, but it was much better than the first-cut. There also was no longer the problems of multi-core issues like experienced with the first tests.