The Linux Evolution For Intel Haswell's Performance

While the Intel Haswell CPUs were just launched days ago, there's already quite a Linux story to them. The Haswell CPU is interesting and the performance is good, but there's still extra headroom to make especially when it comes to the graphics driver and performance relative to Intel's Windows driver. Even so, the Intel Haswell Linux support has already evolved a great deal.

The Intel Haswell Linux benchmarks delivered so far on Phoronix have been when using Ubuntu 13.04 but upgrading to the in-development Linux 3.10 kernel, Mesa 9.2 graphics stack, and GCC 4.8 compiler. But how's the performance "out of the box" for Ubuntu 13.04? The benchmarks in this article answer that question. In this article are benchmarks from the same Intel Core i7 4770K when carrying out a clean install of 64-bit Ubuntu 13.04, then installing the Linux 3.10 kernel, then installing Mesa 9.2 in conjunction with the Linux 3.10 kernel, and lastly when replacing GCC 4.7 with GCC 4.8.

All benchmarking was handled in a completely automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.