9-Way Linux Laptop Performance Comparison From Intel Nehalem To Broadwell

[Miblo]

Lafit?

I'm thinking of getting a ultrabook in the coming months.
Could you give any recommendation?
I'll be using just Linux on it and my budget is about 800-900.

Not a recommendation yet because it hasn't arrived, but I recently ordered PC Specialist's Lafit? with i7-5500U, 8GB DDR3, 1TB HDD and a 120GB M.2 SSD for ?682. No idea what audio / trackpad drivers it needs, though. Ideally not the same as the Dell darkbasic mentioned.

Cheers for the tests, Michael. I'm looking forward to comparing my i7-5500U with your i7-5600U.

[darkbasic]

Thanks for the suggestion. Laptop looks really good.
I've found though a few blogs (like this) where people are commenting on several important bugs (no sound, trackpad freeze, etc). I'll be keeping an eye the following months on these matters to see if they are being ironed out.

Keyboard and touchpad issues are already fixed, you just need to revert:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d1c7e29e8d276c669e8790bb8be9f505ddc48888

The only bug remaining is audio:

Newer kernels use the _OSI string "Windows 2013", which - among other things - makes the XPS-13 9343 use its sound card with the I2S bus - it's a dual-mode sound card, which supports both I2S and HDA. Older kernels don't set this string, and so the XPS-13 will use the HDA bus with them. The current Realtek driver doesn't support that particular card on I2S, but does support it on HDA.

Unfortunately, not setting that string borks the trackpad, because the machine then uses a different mode for that.

So, without that _OSI, sound works but the trackpad doesn't. With it, the trackpad works but sound doesn't. You can force old-kernel behaviour easily in a new kernel using a boot-time parameter, and then... sound works but the trackpad doesn't.

In other words, at this particular moment, we effectively either have working sound and borken trackpad, or working trackpad and no sound.

[Viper_Scull]

Dell XPS 13 2015, starting from 799$.

Thanks for the suggestion. Laptop looks really good.
I've found though a few blogs (like this) where people are commenting on several important bugs (no sound, trackpad freeze, etc). I'll be keeping an eye the following months on these matters to see if they are being ironed out.

[schmidtbag]

I would love to see a "Performance per Dollar" in these results. In which categories its better to spend money in.

I think this would be a great thing to show but it's only useful for comparing products of the same generation.

[darkbasic]

Dell XPS 13 2015, starting from 799$.

[Viper_Scull]

I'm thinking of getting a ultrabook in the coming months.
Could you give any recommendation?
I'll be using just Linux on it and my budget is about 800-900.

[Phexe]

Would this be a naive performance per dollar taking into account only hardware price or performance per dollar with performance per watt combined with estimate of price of electricity?

No basically just to show Mac's are horribly overpriced.

[nanonyme]

I would love to see a "Performance per Dollar" in these results. In which categories its better to spend money in.

Would this be a naive performance per dollar taking into account only hardware price or performance per dollar with performance per watt combined with estimate of price of electricity?

[Phexe]

$

I would love to see a "Performance per Dollar" in these results. In which categories its better to spend money in.

[baffledmollusc]

Thanks Michael, those perf per watt tests were really interesting.

One of the things that surprises me is that the power consumption of the CPU relative the rest of the system has been steadily dropping over the past few years, but Broadwell still does so outstandingly well.

From a desktop point of view Broadwell is pretty meh, but for laptops it looks very impressive indeed.