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

Before getting to the really interesting results, first up are some CPU thermal benchmarks for the laptops. Unfortunately, for a number of the laptops on the Linux 3.18 kernel, the core temperature monitoring was borked. A number of these systems were just reporting 20C constantly during testing, which was inaccurate and a regression compared to the last time I did thermal monitoring on some of these laptops.

The laptops producing accurate results ended up being the Haswell Apple MacBook Air, Broadwell ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and Sandy Bridge HP EliteBook.

The X1 Carbon ended up running warmer than the very thick HP EliteBook Sandy Bridge laptop but well below the temps of the Apple MacBook Air.

The Broadwell-based Core i7 X1 Carbon had an average temperature during testing of about 58C with a peak of 72C. You can view more of the CPU thermal information via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.