Early Ubuntu 21.04 Benchmarks Point To Some Slides In Performances But Overall Flat

In yesterday's Linux distribution benchmark comparison on a Ryzen 9 5900X, you may have noticed some of the Ubuntu 21.04 development benchmarks coming in slower than Ubuntu 20.10 but overall a tight race. That is something I've seen now on other systems too -- such as these results to pass along today from an Intel notebook with the latest Ubuntu 20.10 vs. 21.04 development tests.

While still having my hands on the HP ZBook Studio G7 Linux mobile workstation and as shown in that article the nice speed-ups going from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.10, I was curious to see how Ubuntu 21.04 would perform on the Intel Comet Lake notebook given the mixed results I've been seeing on other hardware, primarily desktops.

On this Intel mobile workstation moving from the latest Ubuntu 20.10 stable updates to Ubuntu 21.04 in its current development state this week did point to some slowdowns in performance as well as some improvements.

Some of the most significant slowdowns seen on this system were with heavy multi-threaded workloads with the likes of the Intel SVT video encoder benchmarks. But with both Ubuntu 20.10 and 21.04 making use of GCC 10, one of the possible scenarios is a regression in the power management of Linux 5.10 or Intel's Thermald. Ubuntu 21.04 currently is on Linux 5.10 from 5.8 and Thermald 2.4 from 2.3.1. In any case this was just some quick tests prior to sending back the review unit, so as the Ubuntu 21.04 release approaches in two months, I'll be back around with tests on more hardware.

Overall though the Ubuntu 21.04 performance isn't in bad standing if looking at the geometric mean of 223 benchmarks conducted on Ubuntu 21.04 Dev vs 20.10, the overall performance is quite close just with some regressions at least for the moment. This largely jives with what we have been seeing with other x86_64 hardware like shown in yesterday's Ryzen desktop tests.

If you've been trying out the Ubuntu 21.04 daily snapshots, be sure to share your results in our forums. See all 200+ tests in full from this Ubuntu 21.04 daily testing on the HP ZBook Studio G7 via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.