Dell XPS 13 9380 + Intel Core i7 8565U Ubuntu Linux Performance Benchmarks

At the end of January, Dell announced the Dell XPS 13 9380 Developer Edition laptop as an upgraded version of the XPS 9370 with now having Intel Whiskey Lake CPUs and other minor improvements. Over the past two weeks I've been testing out the Dell XPS 9380 with Intel Core i7 8565U processor with 256GB of NVMe SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. Here are benchmarks of the Dell XPS 9380 compared to several other laptops running Ubuntu Linux as well as looking at the system thermal and power consumption among other metrics.

The Dell XPS 13 9380 is just a minor refinement over the 9370, which is alright since that previous laptop was -- and still remains -- a quite competent laptop with great build quality and capable performance in early 2019. Besides switching to the newer Intel U-series CPU, one of the only visible changes with the Dell XPS 13 9380 is moving the web camera from below the 13-inch display to now being back above the display. This addresses one of the common complaints about the Dell XPS 13 9370.

On the software side, with the Dell XPS 13 9380 model there is the option of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the earlier model. That's a very welcome change, granted, it's easy for most users to simply upgrade to the latest release or install the OS of your choosing.

There are plenty of USB-C ports on the 9380 and other ports in common with the 9370. While no full size USB ports, a single USB-C to USB Type-A adapter is included.

The Dell XPS 13 9380 being tested has the Intel Core i7 565U processor (4.6GHz turbo frequency, four cores / eight threads), 16GB of system memory, 256GB SK Hynix NVMe SSD, and UHD Graphics 620.

While the Dell XPS 13 9380 ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, for this round of benchmarking I was using Ubuntu 18.10 for the newer kernel, the GCC8 compiler, a newer version of Mesa for the UHD Graphics tests, and other updates. Last week I shared benchmarks of six different Linux distributions on the 9380, all of which worked fine, in case you are thinking about buying the Dell XPS 13 9380 Developer Edition and then loading your favorite distribution instead.