A First Look At The Ubuntu 12.04 Performance

Ubuntu 12.04 is booting slightly faster than previous releases for the Lenovo ThinkPad W510, but how is the much talked about power consumption?

When the system is idling, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS hits a new low-point in power consumption! The power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 was awful due to the PCI Express ASPM issue on the W510 and other Linux power bugs. However, the PCI-E ASPM issue was finally fixed upstream along with a couple other issues, plus Canonical is now trying to improve the power management. There is still some work left, but Ubuntu 12.04 power consumption from this Intel notebook on battery power is looking much better than its Linux predecessors.

When all CPU cores were maxed out by the C-Ray ray-tracing benchmark, the Ubuntu 12.04 power consumption from this single notebook remained lower than Ubuntu 10.10/11.04/11.10.