Intel Tiger Lake Performance On Ubuntu 21.04 Benchmarks

With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04.

Curious if these Ubuntu 21.04 performance improvements carried through to Intel-powered laptops, I ran some benchmarks on a Core i7 1165G7 laptop across the two latest Ubuntu releases.

With Ubuntu 21.04 there is the Linux 5.11 kernel, Mesa 21.0 for the newest Xe Graphics support, GCC 10.3, and other updates to enjoy.

Like with the desktop/server tests, Ubuntu 21.04 is building Rust code much faster (timed Wasmer test) and there are some other comile time improvements to enjoy if frequently building code on your laptop. There were also various other workloads showing small benefits on Ubuntu 21.04. In a few graphics test cases there were regressions relative to Ubuntu 20.10 but overall the Ubuntu 21.04 performance was looking good.

Out of 91 tests run in total on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04, the performance came out about the same overall. Ubuntu 21.04 wasn't showing as many performance wins as we've seen on larger Intel systems but for a few workloads as shown above there were some advantages of this latest Ubuntu release.

See all of the 91 benchmarks in total for this Tiger Lake Ubuntu 21.04 laptop via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.