Some Linux Hardware Statistics From Phoronix Global

On Phoronix Global we have more than 25,000 benchmark result submissions from independent users around the world since launching the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite back in early 2008. As I have been hinting at for several months, with the launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 by the end of this year, Phoronix Global will be getting its long overdue overhaul and there are some revolutionary features being worked on as it concerns benchmarking and collaborative testing. This evening, however, there are some hardware statistics to share for the more than 25,000 existing result uploads.

While this data has been building up for two years, with the existing Phoronix Global interface it's really not well utilized nor internally has this hardware data and results been studied on any mass scale. About the only Linux hardware usage statistics we have published at Phoronix to date have been results from our yearly Linux Graphics survey, since it is very difficult to obtain accurate numbers in regards to the hardware that is being used by a majority of the Linux users. For the first time, however, we are publishing statistics for this mass collection of the benchmark result uploads to Phoronix by the community.

Of course, these numbers don't represent the Linux community as a whole, since those using the Phoronix Test Suite software are generally the more advanced users, enthusiasts, and gamers. Many of the professional users of the Phoronix Test Suite also opt to not upload their results to Phoronix Global due to the use of unreleased hardware and other privacy concerns. But, for what it's worth, below are numbers showing the overall percentages of the different brands of CPUs and GPUs where results have been uploaded to our benchmarking portal.

CPUs On Phoronix Global
Intel: 77.344%
AMD: 13.431%
QEMU / KVM: 8.811%
VIA: 0.094%
Unknown: 0.125%
PowerPC: 0.02%
ARM: 0.176%

By a very large margin, Intel CPUs end up in more systems being benchmarked than AMD CPUs. Intel CPUs were nearly 6x more common than AMD CPUs! Benchmarking virtualized guest operating systems is also popular with QEMU / KVM uploads accounting for more than 8% of the uploads.

GPUs On Phoronix Global
NVIDIA: 46.642%
ATI: 30.023%
Intel: 10.972%
Matrox: 1.403%
VIA / SiS: 0.721%
VMware: 2.02%
XGI: 0.539%
Cirrus: 6.633%
VirtualBox: 0.734%
ASPEED: 0.282%
Silicon Motion: 0.03%

Our 2009 Linux Graphics survey showed NVIDIA GPUs being more common to the Linux desktop than ATI/AMD graphics processors, and this too is the case with Phoronix Global. NVIDIA GPUs were in nearly half of the benchmarked systems while ATI/AMD just accounted for a bit more than 30%. Intel was approaching 11% usage. Surprisingly, Matrox GPUs accounted for more than 1% of the test uploads. Cirrus accounted for more than 6% of the uploads, which largely come from those using QEMU/KVM.

More statistics and other information that leverages this plethora of test data we have been building up will be published in the coming weeks and months.