Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

The Lenovo ThinkPad W510 being tested had an Intel Core i7 720QM clocked at 1.60GHz with a total of eight logical cores (four physical cores + Hyper Threading), 4GB of DDR3 system memory, a 320GB Hitachi HTS72503 7200RPM SATA HDD, a 1600 x 900 display panel, and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor with 1GB of video memory. The Intel Core i7 720QM continues to be one of the fastest quad-core notebook processors available with a max Turbo Frequency of 2.8GHz, 6MB of Intel Smart Cache, SSE4.2 support, and is built on a 45nm process. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor has 48 CUDA cores, a 550MHz core clock, 1GB of 128-bit 790MHz DDR3 video memory, OpenGL 3.2 support, and supports OpenCL 1.0. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M is based upon the consumer-grade GeForce GT 330M mobile GPU.

Using this Lenovo ThinkPad notebook, we compared the performance of Windows 7 Professional x64 to that of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (x86_64). On the Windows side there was the NVIDIA 258.96 WHQL driver while on the Linux side the testing was done with the latest 256.35 release. The stock Ubuntu Lucid packages besides NVIDIA's proprietary driver remained with their default versions and configuration. The tests in this article are SPECViewPerf 10.0, IOzone, and OpenSSL. Another article to be published later will offer up the gaming results and more consumer-oriented tests. Testing was done under Windows and Linux using the latest Phoronix Test Suite code from the 2.8 "Torsken" release.