Ubuntu 21.10 Delivering Some Performance Gains On The Intel Core i9 11900K

For those wondering how the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 release is looking for Intel "Rocket Lake" owners, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus 21.10 development benchmarks across dozens of different tests.

With last month running some early Ubuntu 21.10 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, the focus this time around with the latest Ubuntu 21.10 development build as of testing was for any performance changes on the Intel Core i9 11900K front.

Ubuntu 21.10 is bringing a newer version of the Linux kernel, GNOME Shell 40, a newer version of Mesa, GCC 11 as the default system compiler, and other package updates. Particularly for those running newer hardware, the newer versions generally mean better performance and features.

On the same Core i9 11900K desktop, Ubuntu 21.04 with all available updates was benchmarked against Ubuntu 21.10 in its current development form.

When looking at the results with a measurable, statistically significant difference between the Ubuntu releases, indeed Ubuntu 21.10 was tending to come out ahead of Ubuntu 21.04. QuantLib, Mobile Neural Network, PHP, and Python performance were among the areas where the Intel desktop tested was seeing the largest improvements with Ubuntu 21.10.

Out of 117 tests ran in total, Ubuntu 21.10 had a narrow edge overall on Ubuntu 21.04 for this particular system.

See all 100+ benchmarks of Ubuntu 21.04 vs. 21.10 daily on this Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.