Intel Tiger Lake Performance Across Five Autumn 2021 Linux Distributions

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved from Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10, but how does Canonical's latest Linux offering compete with other autumn 2021 distributions? In this article from the Dell XPS Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake notebook are benchmarks of Ubuntu 21.10 going up against Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, and openSUSE Tumbleweed for getting an idea how the performance compares with this latest-generation Intel EVO notebook.

The Dell XPS with Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake processor and Xe Graphics, 16GB of RAM, and Kioxia 256GB NVMe SSD was used for testing across these five modern Linux distributions. The key OS information includes:

Ubuntu 21.10 - Testing Ubuntu 21.10 in its near final form with the Linux 5.13 kernel, GCC 11.2, Mesa 21.2, and other up-to-date packages. As shown in the aforelinked tests, Ubuntu 21.10 on Tiger Lake is showing a nice performance upgrade over 21.04.

Fedora Workstation 35 Beta - The beta release of Fedora Workstation 35 due to ship later this month with Linux 5.14, GCC 11.2, Mesa 21.2, and other package updates.

Arch Linux - The rolling-release Arch Linux with updates following its 2021.10.01 ISO roll-out that has it on Linux 5.14, Mesa 21.2, and other package versions largely aligned with the likes of Fedora.

openSUSE Tumbleweed - openSUSE's latest rolling release also on Linux 5.14, Mesa 21.2, and other up-to-date packages.

Clear Linux 25100 - Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux platform that as of testing was on Linux 5.13, Mesa 21.2, GCC 11.2, and other similar versions to the other platforms.

See the system table for all of the defaults and other key version information on each of the platforms. Each Linux distribution was freshly installed and tested in its out-of-the-box configuration as much as possible. The system table also notes various defaults like Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed not shipping Intel Thermald by default, Arch Linux defaulting to intel_cpufreq Schedutil, and the various optimized defaults applied by Clear Linux.