Riding The Latest Linux Kernel & Mesa Is Great For Intel's Braswell

Last month I wrote about the latest Linux kernel yielding better performance for Intel Bay Trail hardware. Those gains also carry over to Intel's newest Braswell SoCs. Here are some tests with the newest Linux kernel and Mesa Git code when using the new Intel Braswell NUC with Celeron N3050.

The NUC5CPYH is Intel's new NUC powered by a Celeron N3050 dual-core SoC based on the Airmont architecture with HD Graphics boasting 12 execution units. The Celeron N3050 has a six Watt TDP. This new NUC can be found for as little as $130 USD.

Coming up as soon as this afternoon will be some proper comparison benchmarks for this Celeron N3050 NUC compared to other hardware, but first up I just wanted to share some numbers for the performance difference when upgrading the kernel.

On the next page are some CPU and GPU benchmark results for this NUC when first testing Ubuntu 15.04 out-of-the-box (Linux 3.19 and Mesa 10.5) and then upgrading to the Linux 4.2 Git kernel and Mesa 10.7-devel.