macOS 10.12 Sierra vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux Benchmarking

[SaucyJack]

Aw Michael you're so modest, truth is Ubuntu was way ahead on most benchmarks but there were one offs where MacOS was ahead (and curiously so). These overpriced turds literally just barely make the cut to compete with free software in terms of quality and performance...

The only benchmarks apple excelled in were the couple that Clang are ahead of GCC on. Which means it's not "Apple" that performed well on those benchmarks.

[microcode]

I really wish he would stop including compile time benchmarks in this way; they are entirely meaningless if it's not the same version of the same compiler with the same flags. Comparing standard Clang 3.8 on Linux to "Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.38)"(the macOS Sierra system compiler) tells you more about the build configuration for these compilers than the speed of the system. A better comparison would be between the gcc-6 package on homebrew and GCC 6.0 on Linux.


Side note: I wonder a lot why Apple doesn't use Mesa as their Intel GL stack on OS X. Seems like they would get much better performance for less effort than it takes to keep their proprietary driver up to date. It also seems like some of their GL extensions are already implemented in Mesa.

[curaga]

With the mention this version has a new file system, APFS, I kinda expected it to be used.

[blackout23]

At least windows can usually keep up or even win numerous tests. This crap? You're really just paying for a logo.

Hey...Macs are great if you love to use imagemagik it seems. ;-)

[skurk]

This pretty much confirms what I've always felt. No matter how new the Mac is and how good the specs are they always feel incredibly slow.

Pretty nice OS and hardware from a usability perspective, but good performance, no not really.

[xevrem]

I will admit, there were significant improvements with their metal API between 10.11 and 10.12, but that really cant be honestly directly compared. Though i guess if you can find a game that implements metal, vulkan, and DX12 you could have a relative comparison... but that still doesn't mean each API was optimized for, just that it was included...

[caligula]

The filesystem / sql transaction benchmarks are suspicious. I suspect that Apple's system doesn't sync in the same way.

Also would be nice to compare Clear Linux or some other optimized Linux against macOS. The people who are interested in performance don't use Ubuntu.

[Michael]

The filesystem / sql transaction benchmarks are suspicious. I suspect that Apple's system doesn't sync in the same way.

Also would be nice to compare Clear Linux or some other optimized Linux against macOS. The people who are interested in performance don't use Ubuntu.

Unfortunately Clear Linux doesn't work on the MacBooks, tried it out.

[labyrinth153]

I just installed arch on my base model mini. I had to do some manual copying to get grub to boot with efi. Performance with geekbench is slightly higher than osx (and osx to windows 10). The only thing I noticed is reading from the disk is way better on Linux, applications start instantly and have a huge delay on os x. I think once applefs and metal roll out things will be better. I am debating if I should build a powerful zareason arch/windows box or suffer a little for a nice imac.

if anyone wants some osx vs linux/windows benchmarks I can run some.

[Hi-Angel]

I really wish he would stop including compile time benchmarks in this way; they are entirely meaningless if it's not the same version of the same compiler with the same flags. Comparing standard Clang 3.8 on Linux to "Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.38)"(the macOS Sierra system compiler) tells you more about the build configuration for these compilers than the speed of the system. A better comparison would be between the gcc-6 package on homebrew and GCC 6.0 on Linux.


Side note: I wonder a lot why Apple doesn't use Mesa as their Intel GL stack on OS X. Seems like they would get much better performance for less effort than it takes to keep their proprietary driver up to date. It also seems like some of their GL extensions are already implemented in Mesa.

Agreed. It would a be a win for both Mac (for obvious reasons), and Linux (because more engineers would contribute into the drivers).