Ubuntu 64-bit More Competitive Against Mac OS X

Last week we published Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 benchmarks where we compared the performance of these two popular operating systems on a Mac Mini. With the OS X kernel currently being 32-bit but with support for 64-bit applications, we had used the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04. In a majority of the Leopard operating system from Apple outperformed Canonical's Jaunty Jackalope, but today we are adding in the results from an Ubuntu 64-bit installation. As you can see from the results, the x86_64 version of Ubuntu Linux is more competitive against Mac OS X 10.5.6.

We used the same hardware and software configuration as our earlier article when running this 64-bit Linux test. The Apple Mac Mini was loaded with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 clocked at 1.83GHz, an Intel 945 + ICH-7M motherboard with integrated graphics, 1GB of DDR2 memory, and an 80GB Hitachi HTS542580K9SA00 HDD. The kernel reported on OS X 10.5.6 is 9.6.0 i386, X Server 1.3.0-apple22, OpenGL 1.2 APPLE-1.5.36, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system was used. Ubuntu 9.04 uses the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, X Server 1.6.0, xf86-video-intel 2.6.3, OpenGL 1.4 Mesa 7.4, GCC 4.3.3, and an EXT3 file-system. When installing Apple's X Code it ships with both GCC 4.0 and GCC 4.2, but we had enabled the later version to be more comparable to the modern day GCC that the Linux distributions are generally using. Both operating systems were left running with their stock settings during the testing process.

For the Linux and Mac OS X benchmarking we used the Phoronix Test Suite. We ran the same exact tests from our article last week, which included Urban Terror, Java 2D Microbenchmark, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, FFmpeg, timed PHP compilation, timed ImageMagick compilation, 7-Zip compression, Gzip compression, GnuPG, OpenSSL, BYTE Unix Benchmark, SciMark, SQLite, Crafty, Threaded I/O Tester, PostgreSQL pgbench, Sunflow Rendering System, Bork File Encrypter, and Java SciMark.

On the following pages are our Mac OS X 10.5.6 and Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit results from last week and now with the Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit results appended.