System76 Galago UltraPro Performance Preview
Exciting many Phoronix readers in recent weeks has been the Galago UltraPro from System76, a Linux-focused ultrabook that's pre-loaded with an Intel Haswell CPU and sports Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics. In this article are some early Linux performance benchmarks of the high-end Ubuntu Linux ultrabook.
As mentioned last week in delivering the first Linux benchmarks of Intel's Iris Pro 5200, I mentioned System76 was in the process of sending over a Galago UltraPro review sample but in the meantime a Phoronix reader had provided me with remote access to his new and yet-to-be-commissioned Galago UltraPro. I used that laptop for last week's early Iris Pro benchmarks and I managed to squeeze in some general performance benchmarks too.
Many more Galago UltraPro benchmarks will be performed at Phoronix as soon as the review sample arrives, which should be this week. The benchmarks in this article are just the Galago UltraPro results joined side-by-side to my earlier System76 Gazelle Professional benchmarks that besides having the performance of the Intel Core i7 4900MQ System76 laptop also had Linux numbers on an ASUS K56CA Ultrabook (Ivy Bridge) and HP EliteBook 1611C (Sandy Bridge) laptop. Those results are also present in our first Galago UltraPro performance comparison.
All of these laptops/ultrabooks were running updated installations of Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64. However, in having only limited time to benchmark the Galago UltraPro and having to deal with it remotely, the Galago UltraPro tests are slightly different. Compared to the System76 Gazelle Pro, ASUS Ivy Bridge Ultrabook, and HP Sandy Bridge EliteBook, the Galago UltraPro had a slightly newer graphics stack of Mesa 9.3-devel oibaf-ppa over Mesa 9.1.6 found by Ubuntu 13.04 as the default. The Galago UltraPro testing also happened with both the Linux 3.8 kernel and the Linux 3.11 kernel. So the Galago UltraPro has a slight advantage over the other Intel laptops in this comparison for the graphics tests with newer Mesa and kernel, but again, as soon as my System76 review sample physically arrives there will be plenty more tests.
All benchmarking in this article were performed using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org software.