Ubuntu 12.10 Is Faster With Intel Hardware

While benchmarks have already indicated ARM performance improvements in Ubuntu 12.10, early testing of this "Quantal Quetzal" release has also revealed that Intel hardware is benefiting too from performance optimizations for this Linux operating system update due out in October.

In this article are benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 12.10 2012-08-13 on a CompuLab Intense-PC. The Intense-PC, which will be reviewed on Phoronix in the near future, comes from the same Israeli manufacturer that put out the Fit-PC2 and Tegra 2 Trim-Slice. The Intense-PC is based upon Intel's Ivy Bridge micro-architecture with their compelling integrated graphics found on a low-power Core i7 processor. The hardware making up the Intense-PC is quite interesting while being within a very small form factor. The PC is also Linux-friendly and shipped with Linux Mint.

A stock Ubuntu 12.04 installation was tested as well as when updating the clean Ubuntu 12.04 LTS install with all of the available stable release updates as of this week. This updated testing was done since Canonical has back-ported some performance improvements already to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, like the Unity performance fixes for OpenGL. The Ubuntu 12.10 development install were the packages as of 13 August 2012. The same CompuLab Intense-PC with Intel Core i7-3517UE processor was used throughout all of this Ubuntu Linux benchmarking.

A variety of benchmarks spanning different sub-systems under Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin and Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.