New Windows vs. Linux Benchmarks Are On The Way

A few months back we began publishing some open-source Windows benchmarks once the Phoronix Test Suite started picking up Microsoft Windows 7 x64 support to join Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X as another supported testing platform. We had published Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks and then a benchmarking threesome of Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. We had also benchmarked EXT4 vs. the NTFS file-system while the real loser throughout all of this testing was the Intel Linux graphics driver as being the really sore spot for Linux performance when compared to Windows throughout all of our tests. A new set of Windows vs. Linux benchmarks are to be carried out over the next week or two and we will be running even more tests this time around.

This morning a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that I bought for the office had arrived. Of course, the first task with this new ThinkPad will to benchmark it every which way with its Intel Core i7 Q720 processor, 4GB of system memory, and a NVIDIA Quadro 880M graphics processor. A variety of benchmarks will be run from this notebook with its Intel processor that boasts eight threads (quad-core + Hyper Threading) from LLVMpipe tests with Intel's new GLSL compiler to running more Ubuntu 10.10 performance tests. First on the agenda though is to run a new performance comparison of Windows 7 Professional vs. Ubuntu 10.04 (and potentially other Linux operating systems).

The usual OpenGL gaming tests that were run the first time around will be used plus the others have been thrown into the mix. For Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 (a.k.a. Torsken) I am also committing Windows support for a number of other test profiles in the coming days with a mixture of new CPU tests.

The new Windows 7 vs. Linux results from the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook with its Intel Core i7 CPU should be ready by the middle of next week, so stay tuned. A review of the fully-loaded ThinkPad W510 notebook under Linux should also be published in August.